Sun Hub Sun Simba

After an article recently published in support of the PlanarSun solar battery crowdfunding project , I was surprised to find that they avoided the more interesting and promising project of the Morgan Solar Sun Simba flat solar concentrator that I want to share with the community .







At first glance it may seem that this is the usual Fresnel Lens , however this is not the case and the principle of its operation is completely different.

The need for hubs was already explained in the PlanarSun article, so I’ll go straight to the description.

Morgan Solar is a Canadian energy startup with tens of millions of dollars invested .

In the patent there are many options for focusing solar radiation using 1-3 aspherical surfaces, but the most illustrative one is shown in the figure:



The principle of operation is very simple. Sun Simba hub consists of aspherical grooves arranged in a circle. They focus parallel incident radiation into small “gaps”. Then the radiation enters the wedge, from which it cannot escape, and propagates to the solar cell.

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In addition to the obvious advantages:

1. Compactness in comparison with the same Fresnel lens, parabolic mirror and Cassegrain system

2. Low energy loss







There is a disadvantage:

1. It is necessary to strictly focus the hub to the sun, with which the tracking systems are quite capable.



Compared to “PlanarSun”, Sun Simba has a much higher concentration of radiation - almost to a point, and not to two opposite planes. On the other hand, “PlanarSun” has a larger angular field along one coordinate, which facilitates tracking the sun.

I do not want to say that the hub PlanarSun is worse, but it is clearly flawed.



And a little video about the project of the company Morgan Solar: