Soltrace

Soltrace seems to be a good solution for your probelm (I never work with this). It is freeware!!

For general optical ray tracing, I would prefer ZEMAX in sequential and non-sequential mode.

Thank you Dr. Laurenzis. What I need is a user-friendly software that enables me to both design and then investigate the performance (and maybe optimize it) for different solar concentrator optics.

I was trying several software (including SolTrace and ZEMAX) before settling for one and purchasing it. But then I thought about asking to see if anyone had previous experience with solar concentration design and simulation software and if they had any recommendations..

I know the Zemax, it is a commonly used optical design program for Microsoft Windows sold by American company Radiant Zemax.

It is very versatile.

To design my concentration photovoltaic systems, I've always used TracePro and I found myself very well. Therefore, I highly recommend this program.

We use "Tracer" here at the ANU in Canberra (https://github.com/casselineau/Tracer). It is fully open source, free and in Python language (also free). It is not the most user friendly software because it is command-lines-based but it is the most flexible tool for that same reason. We run receiver geometry optimisation with it, which includes not only optical ray-tracing but also coupled heat transfer processes.

Happy to tell you more if interested.

Your answer would be SAM from NREL which is very friendly and easy. You can design your CSP system then perform the analysis and optimize it and try some parametric design for your case. You can export the data in SOLTRACE to investigate the optical performance in greater details.

SolTrace is a good software for preliminary analysis but these are some drawback of this software as well for example power per ray is not in our hand etc. That's why the results provided by this software can not be used for comparison with different collector geometries