Loughborough University
Browse
Cole_SolarResource_published(IET-RPG.2014.0369).pdf (1.15 MB)

Optical modelling for concentrating photovoltaic systems: insolation transfer variations with solar source descriptions

Download (1.15 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-08, 10:28 authored by Ian Cole, Ralph Gottschalg
Point source, pillbox and circumsolar ratio-dependent extended light source Sun models are used as solar source inputs into an analytical optical ray trace model for the calculation of plane restricted illumination profiles generated by three example lenses. The example lenses are: a low iron soda-lime glass plano-convex lens, a poly (methyl) methacrylate (PMMA) 3-facet Fresnel lens and a PMMA 20-facet Fresnel lens. Significant differences in illumination profiles are found with solar source description variation. Most notably, it is found that chromatic aberrations and spectrally variant effects specific to the multi-junction solar cell architecture are only identified using the extended light source Sun model. The spectral dependency of material optical properties are analysed in the context of the multi-junction cell architecture by means of spectrally weighted averages corresponding to the active range of the sub-cells.

Funding

This work has been supported by a joint UK-India initiative in solar energy through a joint project ‘Stability and Performance of Photovoltaics (STAPP)’ funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) Energy Programme in UK [grant number EP/H040331/1] and by Department of Science and Technology (DST) in India.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

IET Renewable Power Generation

Citation

COLE, I.R. and GOTTSCHALG, R., 2015. Optical modelling for concentrating photovoltaic systems: insolation transfer variations with solar source descriptions. IET Renewable Power Generation, 9(5), pp.412-419.

Publisher

Institution of Engineering and Technology

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is an Open Access Article published by IET and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed.

ISSN

1752-1424

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC