Please check out our recent article in Optics Express! This work was born out of Isaac’s undergraduate research in the NanoEngineering Group (Prof. Gang Chen) at MIT. Here we present the design of nonimaging solar concentrators with performance considerably surpassing the compound parabolic concentrator (CPC). To achieve this, we perturb the CPC profile using an optimized offset spline defined in tangent-normal space. The resulting designs achieve acceptance efficiencies up to 99.3%, the highest reported for any finite-length CPC-like optical concentrator.

Full paper can be found here (open access): https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.476189