Design and Analysis of a High - Efficiency , Cost - Effective Solar Concentrator

Solar concentrating systems are optical systems that concentrate solar energy for conversion into usable energy. Ideally, a solar concentrating system should have the following favorable properties as design criteria: (i) energy-efficient, (ii) cost-effective to construct, and (iii) highly durable and costeffective maintain, even in the presence of high temperature variations, wind and sand loading, and abrasion. Many arid and desert areas, best suited for solar energy harvesting by solar concentrating systems, can experience extreme weather conditions such as high temperature variations and sand storms, providing considerable challenges to durability. Existing solar concentrating system designs are challenged by the criteria (ii) and (iii). This is because their largest parts, their tracking primary concentrators, are relatively expensive to construct and maintain. These primary concentrators are generally mostly composed of relatively expensive metallic material (e.g., steel or aluminum), and moreover these large parts need to track with the movement of the sun. One approach to these technical challenges is to investigate novel designs for solar concentrating systems, with the goal of avoiding some or all of these challenges. The paper describes a novel 2-stage solar concentrating system. The major advantages of our solar concentrating system: are low cost and durability. Unlike most prior solar concentrating systems, it uses immobile primary concentrators composed mostly of concrete, which has very low-cost. The immobile primary concentrators lay on the ground surface, so are largely immune to the effects of wind and storms Our solar concentrating system also employs mobile secondary concentrators that track with the sun; these are relatively small so can cost-effectively be constructed of aluminum. The key design and analysis issues are: optical, structural, and mechanical. The paper provides a detailed description of the design issues of this solar concentrating system. The paper also includes a description of the software simulations executed including (i) SOLIDWORKS for CAD modeling, (ii) MATHLAB computational simulations to simulate solar tracking of the secondary concentrators and to simulate the optics, and (iii) use of NREL’s SAM software to analyze overall performance.