Abstract: An apparatus for generating electricity from solar energy has a large dish reflector with a fly's eye receiver positioned near the focus of the dish reflector, held by a dual axis tracking structure. The fly's eye receiver includes a field lens that concentrates sunlight into an image of the dish reflector, a two-dimensional fly's eye array of contiguous convex lenses extending across the dish image, and a photovoltaic cell behind each convex lens of the fly's eye array. Two imaging stages are provided. First, the dish reflector and the field lens concentrate the sunlight in the form of an image of the dish that is stabilized against pointing errors of the tracking mechanism. Second, the contiguous array of convex lenses divides the sunlight energy of the dish image into portions, one per convex lens, each portion being further concentrated by the respective convex lens onto a corresponding photovoltaic cell.

Abstract: An apparatus for generating electricity from solar energy has a large dish reflector with a fly's eye receiver positioned near the focus of the dish reflector, held by a dual axis tracking structure. The fly's eye receiver includes a field lens that concentrates sunlight into an image of the dish reflector, a two-dimensional fly's eye array of contiguous convex lenses extending across the dish image, and a photovoltaic cell behind each convex lens of the fly's eye array. Two imaging stages are provided. First, the dish reflector and the field lens concentrate the sunlight in the form of an image of the dish that is stabilized against pointing errors of the tracking mechanism. Second, the contiguous array of convex lenses divides the sunlight energy of the dish image into portions, one per convex lens, each portion being further concentrated by the respective convex lens onto a corresponding photovoltaic cell.

Abstract: We disclose here a new type of solar generator using an optical concentrator in which sunlight is concentrated successively in each of two dimensions. Sunlight is first reflected toward a linear focus by a large, deeply-curved, cylindrical trough reflector of parabolic shape. Before the reflected light comes to the focus, it passes through smaller, regularly spaced toroidal arc lenses which further concentrate it in the orthogonal direction. The lenses have the two-dimensional cross section of a convex lens, extended into a toroid by rotation about an axis parallel to the line focus. The toroidal arc lenses operate to efficiently focus at very high-concentration converging rays that are incident from a wide range of directions, from the deeply curved primary reflector. The foci formed by the toroidal arc lenses are formed at regular intervals, spaced along a line parallel to and close to the primary linear trough focus.