Micro Optics in Solar Power Systems

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.