Passive high ratio sunlight concentration configurations

A. Rudnitsky; A. Zaban; Z. Zalevsky

doi:10.2971/jeos.2013.13033

Journal of the European Optical Society - Rapid publications, Vol 8 (2013)

Passive high ratio sunlight concentration configurations

A. Rudnitsky, A. Zaban, Z. Zalevsky

Abstract

During the day the sun is moving along curved 1-D trajectory across the sky. This is essential a priori information that can be used in order to design passive optics to perform efficient collection of sunlight without tracking after sun’s location in the sky. Despite the movement of the sun along its trajectory the optics will collect the energy to the same spatial location where the photo-voltaic cell is positioned. Two novel designs are proposed while the first one is based on waveguides and the second on prisms with high concentration ratio of above 10X. The proposed configurations are validated numerically and experimentally.

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