Edinburgh Napier University

  In reality, a solar panel with concentrator is subject to variable sunlight radiation, wind speed and environmental air temperature in a day, accordingly the solar output power is changed in a wide range of 2W-13W, causing a degraded electric performance [1-3]. Thus it is necessary to characterise optical and thermal behaviour of a crossed compound parabolic concentrator (CCPC) with solar cell in its design stage to optimise its configuration. Presently, the CCPC optical and thermal performance characterisation is usually based on steady-state physics models, see [4-8], for example, thus ignored unsteady variation of air flow and heat transfer in concentrator. In this contribution, we investigate the optical and thermal performance of an isolated CCPC with solar cell from the solar panel in [6,7] by means of ANSYS CFX. The CCPC with solar cell is subject to a variable sunlight radiation intensity, wind speed and air temperature from 6am to 17pm a day which were measured in [6] on 20th March 2009.