Development of Convex Lens Solar Concentrator with Parabolic Tracking

Abstract

Solar energy helps in achieving new levels to satisfy world’s energy needs. The effective way of utilizing sunlight with solar energy concentration technology and recent developments of its applications using convex lens solar concentrator is reviewed in this paper. The present status of application, the ongoing research and development works suggest that with some amount of efforts regarding the manufacturing the convex lens solar concentrators will bring an outstanding market to solar energy concentration application technology in the coming era. The project was focused on the Solar Energy high temperatures using parabolic solar concentrator, Convex lens, transmitting materials and solar tracking. It identified their level of performance. This paper will provide a contemporary review of convex lens solar concentrators and their benefits to make solar technology cheap. It will also analyze on some of the existing solar concentrators used in the solar technology for the past four decades and performance of each concentrator will be explained and compared. This paper makes a review about the recent trends of the concentrated solar energy applications using solar concentrators. The current research and development involves imaging as well as non-imaging systems. In comparison with imaging systems, the other non-imaging systems have the advantages of greater accept angles, greater concentration ratios with minimum volume and short focal length, greater optical efficiency, etc. Based on imaging, concentrated photovoltaic is an important application and the highest solar-to-electric conversion efficiency.