Design construction and analysis of ridge concentrator pv system for small scale applications

Abstract

Rapid urbanization, sudden rise in industrial developments, modern lifestyle of people have increased the per capita greenhouse gas emissions recently in India, which in turn results in severe environmental, financial and health issues. Renewable energy sources were given greater importance in the past few decades to surpass the above-said problems without any adverse effect on economic growth. In this regard, Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is an attractive renewable energy option for clean energy generation but has limited use due to its prohibitively high cost. Maintenance cost of moving parts in continuous tracking system is high in order to prolong the system life. Further, the high cost associated with use of Silica in conventional PV need to be reduced by adopting certain cost-effective concentrator optics. Generally, the PV cell material contributes about 50% of the total cost of PV system. There are several ways available to reduce the PV material consumption/watt of power generation, one of which is the PV concentrator technology. Low concentrator optics (less than 10X) such as Compound Parabolic Collectors (CPCs) and V-trough concentrators, in static or quasi static mode can be used. Based on feasibility studies, Low Concentrated Photovoltaic System (LCPV) system is suited for rural domestic lighting, water pumping and agricultural applications. In concentrating Photo Voltaic (CPV), a large area of sunlight is focused upon the solar cell with the help of an optical device. CPV systems can produce significantly increased temperature on the surface of the PV material, so the energy should be distributed evenly over the cell area to avoid local overheating (hot spots), which can damage the material. Considering the bottlenecks of conventional solar PV and benefits of low concentrator optics, in the present research, a linear ridge concentrator PV system with 1-Sun and 2-Sun concentration were proposed for lighting and water pumping applications. Here, the entire tracking can be reduced to a single axi