Solar Concentrator Consisting of Multiple Aspheric Reflectors

Abstract

This paper presents an off-axis-focused solar concentrator system consisting of 190 aspheric reflectors, where the aperture radius of each reflector is 10 cm, and vertices of all reflectors are orderly arranged in the same plane. The aspheric parameters controlling the curvature of the reflectors are determined using coordinate transformations and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Based on these aspheric parameters, the light distribution of focal plane was calculated by the ray tracing method. The analyses show that the designed concentrator system has a spot radius of less than 1 cm and the concentration ratio over 3300:1 is achieved using only one reflection. The design results have been verified with the optical design software Zemax.

Keywords

• concentrating solar power system
• aspheric reflector
• off-axis point focusing
• pso algorithm