CHEAPER SHAPES FOR CPC PRESERVING CONCENTRATION EFFICIENCY

摘要

Key issues for the wide diffusion of compact devices for sunlight exploitation are both reduction of costs and increase in efficiency. A promising device should reach a good tradeoff between these two requirements. We studied the possibility to approximate a Compound Parabolic Concentrator (CPC) by simpler shapes, while maintaining as much as possible the level of sunlight collection efficiency. We investigated several approximation approaches, with a common characteristic being the use of truncated conic surfaces that are easy to optically manufacture by cheap and widely available machining techniques. All the considered configurations were compared and quantitatively evaluated using lighting simulation software (Lambda Research Trace-Pro), considering the collected power of obtained sunlight distributions.