The use of corrugated booster reflectors for solar collector fields

The use of booster reflectors in front of solar collectors is an establishe d technique for increasing the irradiation onto solar collectors. By using corrugated instead of flat booster reflectors iris possible to increase the annual irradiation onto the collector plane, thereby maximising the annual output from the collector-reflector arrangement. The paper includes a desc ription of a ray tracing program which calculates the annual optical perfor mance of a collector-booster reflector system with different V-corrugated r eflectors. Calculations based on Swedish solar radiation data show that the use of a booster reflector with varying V-corrugations along the reflector , instead of a hat booster reflector, can increase the annual reflected dir ect radiation on to the collector by 10%. This is estimated to result in a 3% increase in the annual collector output. The ray-tracing calculations ar e compared with measurements of the reflection characteristics of single V- shaped reflector arrangements. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights re served.