Abstract
At present, the Fresnel lens are commonly used as the condenser in high-concentrating photovoltaic (HCPV) modules. It is ideally believed that the output power of a III–V triple-junction solar cell which is placed on the focal plane of a Fresnel lens is the largest, because the intensity of the sunlight on the focal plane is the largest. Actually, according to our work, the dispersion of sunlight through a Fresnel lens and the nonparallelism and divergence of the incident light will lead to changes in the spectrum and the homogeneity of illumination, and cause a drop of the solar cell output. In this paper, the influence of the dispersion and nonparallel incidence of the light on the output of a triple-junction solar cell at different positions near the focal plane were theoretically studied, combined with the light-tracing simulation method and triple-junction solar cell circuit network model. The results show that the III–V triple-junction solar cell has the highest output power in both sides of the focal plane positions. The output power can be increased by about 15% after being optimized. The simulation results were verified by the experiments.
Highlights
The triple-junction cell is currently one of the most common multijunction cells used in high-concentrating photovoltaic (HCPV) modules
Work was carried out for Fresnel lens design [7, 8] focused on improving the illumination energy on the cell, by improving the efficiency of the optical lens
In order to study the photovoltaic characteristics of triple-junction cells under Fresnel lens concentrators, we first studied the concentrating characteristics of Fresnel lens for three bands of solar
Summary
The triple-junction cell is currently one of the most common multijunction cells used in high-concentrating photovoltaic (HCPV) modules. It is composed of three p-n junctions in a series. The output power of the solar cell is related to the illumination energy and to the spectral distribution and the uniformity of the illumination. Steiner et al [10] discovered that the output current of their new multijunction solar cell decreased slightly on the designed focal plane of the lens. The illumination distribution of different spectral bands and the power output performance of triple-junction solar cells were obtained
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