Experimental and simulation studies on a novel compound parabolic concentrator

Flat-plate compound parabolic concentrator (CPC), which are typically applied in photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) systems, are highly cost-effective, but its uniformity of the light distribution are poor. In this paper, based on the size calculation model of the traditional flat-plate CPC, the light acceptance uniformities on the acceptance surfaces with different truncations are compared by the Lighttools simulation software. After which, a novel biaxial tracking CPC with a special truncation called well distributed CPC(WD-CPC) and its optimization design are proposed. The light distribution uniformity of the acceptance surface can be improved by WD-CPC, which also has a higher lighting half-angle and a smaller height-width ratio. As shown by simulations, the light non-uniformity of the WD-CPC can be decreased to 0.13 or lower, which is 27.2% of a common CPC. While Measured by experiment, the actual light uniformity of the WD-CPC is 0.153, which is in agreement with simulations. Therefore, it is possible that this concentrator can increase the efficiency of a PV/T system and can prolong the life-span of the photovoltaic cell simultaneously.