As conventional sources of energy are depleting fast, solar energy based devices can only be mass adopted in future if suitable design innovations are conceptualized and investigated to improve its extremely low energy conversion efficiency. In a first, apart from two important components: a collector and chimney, a third component called bell-mount inlet is proposed, investigated and optimised to enhance system thermal performance. Results show that with suitable design changes in collector, chimney and integrating an efficient bell-mouth at the inlet can substantially increase the air velocity by about 270% and hence drastically enhance the turbine power output compared to the conventional design. Further investigations on physics behind such a high increase in air velocity revealed that total pressure potential or the static pressure recovery becomes high and uniform along the chimney height in the new design, which is entirely absent in the conventional design. The lab-scale design was further analysed by scaling to a 50 kW power plant. Results show that the proposed new system can produce electrical power up to 1738 kW for the same collector area and chimney height of the conventional design. The proposed design is compact, efficient and a step towards making the solar device more viable. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.