Demonstration of molded glass primary optics for high-efficiency micro-concentrator photovoltaics

作者：Norman Jost, Guido Vallerotto, Alessandro Tripoli, Stephen Askins, César Domínguez, Ignacio Antón · 发表于：Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1016/j.solmat.2022.111882 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：solar cell performance optimization、Chalcogenide Semiconductor Thin Films、TiO2 Photocatalysis and Solar Cells

Micro-concentrator photovoltaics (micro-CPV) is a branch of the CPV technology where the size of the solar cell is reduced below the millimeter range to permit novel manufacturing methods for cost reductions and maintaining high efficiencies by using high performance optical materials. The reduction in size of all the components demands a very good optical quality of the primary lenses to achieve high concentrations and high optical efficiencies. PMMA or silicon-on-glass are the most used materials for CPV primary optics, but PMMA reliability against UV weathering is questionable and silicone has a large coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatch with respect to glass, which introduces a large thermal sensitivity in the optical efficiency. In contrast, direct glass molding is a promising alternative due to benefits such as a high Abbe number (lower dispersion losses), great mechanical properties, low CTE, low thermal coefficient of the refractive index (dn/dT), and a proven outdoor reliability with very little degradation. Furthermore, glass can generally be manufactured with high throughput, straightforward, and cost-effective compression or roller molding processes. In this work we present a collaboration with the company Holophane S.A.S. in France that resulted in the manufacturing of several micro-CPV lens arrays of plano-convex lenses with a design tailored to the requirements imposed by the manual compression molding process. A comprehensive experimental characteri...