A study for the special Fresnel lens for high efficiency solar concentrators

Design a Fresnel lens for a concentrator to collect more sunlight onto the solar cell due to the efficiency and cost. Since 1970, the non-imaging concentrator was used for solar energy; most of them were reflecting mirrors. The non-imaging optical system provides large aperture and forgiving imaging requirements. The Fresnel lens used in non-imaging optical system was usually called non-imaging Fresnel lens. In this research, the Fresnel lenses were refracting optical elements but diffracting ones. According to the method of Ralf Leutz and Akio Suzuki [2], using minimum deviation and minimum dispersion to design a non-imaging Fresnel lens, which obeys the edge ray principle. Use optical software TracePro to simulate the non-imaging Fresnel lens, and each pitch size was 0.3mm and 200mm focus distant. Discusses the losses of non-imaging Fresnel lens and find out the relation of efficiency and F-Number. The optical concentration ratio could reach 15X (2-D) and 230X (3-D).