Ray-leakage-free sawtooth-shaped planar lightguide solar concentrators

This paper details the design of a ray-leakage-free sawtooth-shaped planar lightguide solar concentrator. The concentrator combines Unger's dimpled planar lightguide solar concentrators [1] with a prism array dimpled planar lightguide solar concentrator. The use of a sawtooth-shaped boundary on the planar lightguide prevents leakages of the guiding ray after multiple reflections in the lightguide. That is, the proposed solar concentrator can achieve a higher geometrical concentration ratio, while maintaining a high optical efficiency at the same time. Numerical results show that the proposed sawtooth-shaped planar lightguide solar concentrator achieves 2300x geometrical concentration ratio without any guiding ray-leakages from the planar lightguide.