Micro Optics in Solar Power Systems

Abstract

The  usage  the  a  new  type  of  micro optic  concentrator  that  collects  the sunlight from hundreds of  small  aperture  lenses within a micro-lenses array and  concentrates  the sunlight on PV slices.  A ray tracking has been performed  by  using  ZEMAX-EE  sequential analysis software to model and optimize the efficiency of  the  micro lenses-array concentrator.

     A new model for array of  lenses concentrator is designed and simulated. This concentrator consists of array of micro lenses to focus solar light on four  rectangular slices of photovoltaic   Si solar cell. The design aims to reduce the cost of  the concentrators by reducing the effective area of the  high cost silicon  material area and  simplifying the  structure of  the  system.  This design  has  high  relative  illumination efficiency  and  that  indicate a good illumination distribution  which  improves  solar  cell  efficiency. The  results  show that micro lenses array concentrator  can  works  well  over such a large range in acceptance angles and  wavelengths, therefore;  this concentrator  does  not  needs to  accurate to tracking  sun through the daytime  which  simplifies the  design and reduces the total cost of  the system.