Explore the concentrating power of fresnel lenses. They are tens, hundreds and more. Depending on the required concentration for PV, you can choose the configuration of Fresnel lenses.

Dear Adam,

Fresnel lens are used to concentrate the solar radiation for the solar concentrated solar cells such as GaAS solar cells. Althoughthe present applications are few, present research and development works on them suggest that Fresnel lens solar concentrators, are promising especially non-imaging Fresnel lenses.

There are plenty of literature dealing with the application of Fresnel lens as a concetrator for the solar radiation.

As an example please follow the review paper: http://www.ijirset.com/upload/2017/april/222_FRESNEL%20LENSES%20ARTICLE_S.pdf

Best wishes

Fresnel lenses also concentrate heat to solar cells. Could they be damaged ?

I should have clarified that my answer implies Fresnel reflectors. I apologize.

Dear gentlemen, thank you for your explanation and discussion. Let me specify further questions:

(1) What is the main advantage of Fresnel lens concentrator panels?

(2) Are photovoltaic panels with Fresnel lenses more efficient than conventional commercial panels? Or costs are clue?

(3) Do you know about any commercially successful application of photovoltaic panels with Fresnel lenses on roofs of buildings? Thank you...

Let us examine what happens if you place a convex lens between the sun and a PV panel. First, the lens will absorb some of the light and scatter some of the light. So the light emerging from the lens in a useful direction will be reduced. Secondly the lens will concentrate the light and thus produce illumination gradients across the cell. The effect will be to increase photocurrent generation where the light is concentrated, but because the cell is now much larger than the area of light, the parasitic shunt diode losses (that occur all over the cell area) will increase and the cell efficiency will drop.

Now you can compensate for these losses by making the cell smaller to match the size of the illuminated area; but is this what is being asked here? Alternatively you can now collect light from an area larger than the cell, so the power output will increase - though probably not much in practice.

In my view the gains are not worth the effort, as you will now have to steer the system, probably in 2 axes - and this is very expensive, and you might find you need GaAs, or tandem cells - and these are extremely expensive.