Edinburgh Napier University

  The electricity productions by free fuel solar cells represent one of the best solutions for reducing CO 2 emission and surpassing oil crisis. Large scale photovoltaic power generation showed a good efficiency in production, but small scale installations are more attractive to the general public and commercialisation especially for Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV). Static solar concentrator is the answer to the challenge of making BIPV cheaper by reducing the area of solar cells used and it is easy to integrate into buildings by being static. In this paper a 3-D ray trace code has been developed using MATLAB in order to study the theoretical optical efficiency and the flux distribution at the photovoltaic cell of an improved atypical 3-D Crossed Compound Parabolic Concentrator (CCPC) for different incidence angles. The optical performance results prove fundamental for the dimensioning and the consideration of the CCPC as a static PV solar concentrator. It was found that the CCPC represents improved geometry of a typical 3-D Compound Parabolic Concentrator (CPC) for the use as a static solar concentrator with an average intercept factor equal to 0.8 but at the same time shows a high non-uniformity of the illumination distribution at the exit aperture.