A comprehensive study of the latitude-orientated configuration of non-imaging focusing heliostat (LO-NIFH) is reported. In this configuration, we have made the sun tracking formulas of a non-imaging focusing heliostat (NIFH) to be independent of the latitude where it is installed; hence we name it a latitude oriented non-imaging focusing heliostat or LO-NIFH. With the new configuration, the LO-NIFH introduces certain potential advantages in field applications; such as offering a standard in mechanical/optical designs, simplifying the mechatronic control schemes, offering high modularity and high scalability in both production and project implementation. One of the most important merits of latitude oriented configuration is that it makes a heliostat operating at a very narrow range of incident angles in a day; for instance, incident angles ranging from 0° to 52° for 14 h of tracking time per day. When a NIFH tracks the sun at a moderately small incident angle, it always makes a reasonably small focused spot (at the target) with a high optical efficiency above 88% at a f / D ratio of greater than 1. For an off-axis solar concentrator, such level of optical efficiency is considered very impressive as it is just 10% less than that of on-axis parabolic dish. We found that the astigmatic spread of a working LO-NIFH has little variation with time as compared to that of a spherical reflector operating in off-axis manner. Computer simulation of the focused spot images was conducted and compared with the spot images photographed at the site of a prototype LO-NIFH with an array of 5 × 5 mirror facets tracking at an incident angle of 23°.
