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Abstract
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| A growing number of companies are entering the challenge of developing high-concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) systems following the promise of low cost electricity generation. However, they have found difficulties for characterizing the performance of their systems at the production line because these high concentration systems imply severe optical requisites that conventional solar simulators are not able to fulfil. At IES-UPM it has been already manufactured a solar simulator for HCPV systems that solves the main problem, i.e. light collimation and uniformity over the receiver to be tested. It is based on a typical flash lamp testing system, with a point light source whose divergent light beam is collimated in reflection by a parabolic mirror. The manufacture of this collimator element is the main technical difficulty to overcome in such a system, since optical quality required is only available at the prohibitively expensive astronomical telescope industry. In collaboration with the Spanish company JUPASA, IES-UPM has developed a commercial mirror with the quality required at much lower cost. It is a 2-m diameter aluminium mirror mounted on a stable metallic structure. The focal distance was fixed at 6 m to be used in combination with lamp bulbs of 6 cm in diameter to provide the angular size of the sun. An additional engineering effort has been put at the remaining components of the simulator, i.e. flash lamp, electronics and control software in order to serve a complete solar simulator to the industry. Complete versions of the simulator have been already installed for several HCPV manufacturers, which are able to characterise on-line every module manufactured 24/7. All of these use III-V multijunction cells as receivers, which are very sensitive to spectrum. A technique for adjusting the spectral distribution of the light for Xenon flash lamps varying their triggering voltage has been studied. It has allowed obtaining the appropriate spectral matching for the systems studied. A general characterization of the illumination system has been carried out and it is presented in this work. | |
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International
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Si |
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Entity
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TPhilipps-University, Marburg, Germany |
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Entity Nationality
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ALEMANIA |
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Place
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Marburg, Alemania |