Ray-Tracing software tools have been widely used in the optical design of solar concentrating collectors. In spite of the ability of these tools to assess the geometrical and material aspects impacting the optical performance of concentrators, their use in combination with experimental measurements in the framework of collector testing procedures as not been implemented, to the date, in none of the current solar collector testing standards. In the latest revision of ISO9806 an effort was made to include linear focusing concentrating collectors but some practical and theoretical difficulties emerged. A Ray-Tracing analysis could provide important contributions to overcome these issues, complementing the experimental results obtained through thermal testing and allowing the achievement of more thorough testing outputs with lower experimental requirements. In order to evaluate different available software tools a comparison study was conducted. Taking as representative technologies for line-focus concentrators the Parabolic Trough Collector and the Linear Fresnel Reflector Collector, two exemplary cases with predefined conditions – geometry, sun model and material properties – were simulated with different software tools. This work was carried out within IEA/SHC Task 49 “Solar Heat Integration in Industrial Processes”.

The fixed mirror solar concentrator (FMSC) is a mobile focus concentrator whose design emerged in the 1970s in an effort to reduce electricity production costs in solar thermal power plants. This geometry has not yet been analyzed with 3D ray-tracing procedures. The geometry of FMSC is defined using three parameters: the number of mirrors N, the ratio of focal length and reflector width F/W, and the intercept factor γ (in order to represent different receiver widths). For the analysis, a 3D ray-tracing code that allows the characterization of solar concentrators was developed. A standard evacuated tube was used as a receiver. The geometric concentration ratio, the optical efficiency, and the transversal and longitudinal incidence angle modifier (IAM) curves for different values of design parameters were calculated. High concentrations imply low F/W values and for high efficiencies, large intercept factor values are required. Increasing the F/W ratio has a positive effect on the transversal IAM, yet a negative one for the longitudinal IAM. Increasing the number of mirrors has a negative effect on both IAM curves due to the self-shadowing between the adjacent steps. Increasing the intercept factor only has a significant positive effect on the longitudinal IAM. The goodness of the IAM factorization approach was analyzed, and it was found that it can be used as long as a new correction factor to account for the focus displacement is introduced. The results presented in this paper provide information, in form of curves, regarding the optical behavior of the FMSC in terms of different design parameters in order to know the possibility to use the FMSC in medium range temperature applications.

Ray tracing software systems are commonly used to analyze the optics of solar energy devices, since they allow to predict the energy gains of devices in real conditions, and also to compare them with other systems constantly emerging in the market. However, the available open-source packages apply excessive simplifications to the model of light-matter interaction, making that the optical behaviour of the systems can not be properly characterized, which in turn implies disagreements between physical experiments and computer simulations. We present here the open source python package OTSun, which applies the Fresnel equations in their most general form, without further simplifications, and is suitable for the simulation of both solar-thermal and photovoltaic systems. The geometrical objects used in this package are created using the parametric 3D modeler FreeCAD, which is also a free and open source program and allows for the construction of arbitrary geometries that can be analyzed with OTSun. These, and other software capabilities, make OTSun extremely flexible and accurate for the optical analysis of solar devices with arbitrary geometry. Additionally, OTSun has a companion webtool, OTSunWebApp, that allows for the usage of certain features of the package without the need to install anything locally. We also show here two numerical experiments that we performed in order to validate the model and implementation: The analysis of the optical efficiency of a Linear Fresnel Reflector (with moving objects), and of a second surface mirror (with variable wavelengths). In each case, the numerical computations had deviations of less than 0.25% from reference models (either computed with another program or with exact formulas).