Design and fabrication of low concentrating second generation PRIDE concentrator

Prototype first generation Photovoltaic Facades of Reduced Costs Incorporating Devices with Optically Concentrating Elements (PRIDE) technology incorporating 3 and 9 mm wide single crystal silicon solar cells showed excellent power output compared to a similar non-concentrating system when it was characterized both indoors using a flash and continuous solar simulator. However, durability and instability of the dielectric material occurred in long-term characterisation when the concentrator was made by using casting technology. For large scale manufacturing process, durability, and to reduce the weight of the concentrator, second generation PRIDE design incorporated 6 mm wide “Saturn” solar cells at the absorber of dielectric concentrators. Injection moulding was used to manufacture 3 kWp of such PV concentrator module for building façade integration in Europe. Special design techniques and cost implications are implemented in this paper. A randomly selected PV concentrator was characterised at outdoors from twenty-four (≈3 kWp) 2nd-G PRIDE manufactured concentrators. The initial PV concentrators achieved a power ratio of 2.01 when compared to a similar non-concentrating system. The solar to electrical conversion efficiency achieved for the PV panel was 10.2% when characterised outdoors. In large scale manufacturing process, cost reduction of 40% is achievable using this concentrator manufacturing technology.