Design of a lens-to-channel waveguide system as a solar concentrator structure.

We present a lens-to-channel waveguide solar concentrator, where the lens array and the channel waveguide act as the primary and the secondary concentrator. Sunlight collected by the lens array is coupled into channel waveguides and exits from one end of the tapered waveguide directly onto photovoltaic cells. A 45° coupler is placed at each lens focal point to couple light into the waveguides. This configuration eliminates any inherent decoupling losses. We provide a detailed math model and simulation results using exemplar system parameters, showing that this structure can achieve 800x concentration at 89.1% optical efficiency under ±0.7° incidence angle.