Study of paraboloidal optical concentrator by ray-tracing method: Foundations

Abstract

This paper presents a software tool, Ray-Tracer, which allows the simulation of a small size paraboloidal concentrator of non-imaging type. The software tool uses the ray-tracing method in order to simulate the propagation of the light and its reflection on a surface. We define all involved physical measures: optical concentration factor, maximum of the optical concentration factor, geometrical concentration factor, optical efficiency, and all equations based on which the measures characterizing the solar radiation can be computed. The simulations were conducted for the days corresponding to equinox and solstice moments. All these results are in agreement with results reported in literature illustrating the fact that the proposed software tool is competitive.