Spectrally Splitting Hybrid Photovoltaic/thermal Receiver Design for a Linear Concentrator

A new spectrally splitting photovoltaic-thermal hybrid receiver has been proposed and optimised for use in a linear concentrator with 10 to 20 suns concentration level. This hybrid system can produce high temperature thermal energy along with electrical output. Since photovoltaic cells cannot operate efficiently at high temperatures, they have been thermally decoupled from the thermal sub-module through spectral beam splitting, to avoid excessive heating of the cells. The proposed configuration incorporates a combination of dichroic filtering and selective volumetric absorption to divide the spectrum between the cells and the thermal sub-modules. The optics of the system has been studied using ray tracing and its performance has been compared against an ideal spectrally splitting system showing promising results.