Investigation effect of a spectral beam splitter on performance of a hybrid CPV/Stirling/TEG solar power system

Abstract The augmentation of clean energy production in energy policy and planning is an important object for most countries. Hence enhancement of power generation from renewable and sustainable energies such as solar energy has been considered by many researchers. In this study, a novel combination of concentrated photovoltaic (CPV), Stirling engine, and thermoelectric generators (TEGs) is simulated theoretically by Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software. Moreover, a novel TEG heat exchanger used to harvest energy from rejected heat of the Stirling engine, while it doesn't have any adverse effect on performance of the Stirling engine. Since both of Stirling engine and CPV have high efficiency in some conditions, determining the contribution of input energy to each section is essential to achieve maximum performance of the system. Therefore, investigation of beam splitter's cut-off wavelength to determine the best energy efficiency for the proposed system is the main object in the present study. The results show that the best performance of the proposed system is achieved within 875 nm cut-off wavelength of the beam splitter. Also, TEG modules could harvest approximately 400 W from rejected heat of the Stirling engine.

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