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Standard compound parabolic concentrator (S-CPC) is difficult to manufacture and has extremely non-uniform energy density distribution on its absorber. A novel design method of multi-sectioned compound parabolic concentrator (M-CPC) based on the programming calculation is presented in this paper whose reliability was verified by a laser experiment. Five M-CPCs with different amounts of the reflective plane on the single side (dimension which is expressed by D) were designed by the method. The optical performance was carried out and compared between the S-CPC and each M-CPCs. The results showed that the M-CPC5 was the optimal structure among all concentrators constructed in this paper, and the uniformity of energy flux distribution on its cylindrical absorber was better than that of S-CPC. Compared with the S-CPC, the range of acceptance angle (Φ) of the M-CPC5 was expanded to ± 47° from ±30°, meanwhile, its average optical efficiency had only decreased 1.35%–31.98%. Besides, M-CPC could effectively reduce the difficulty in manufacture, maintenance and transportation of large curved glass. The proposed optimization design method could be applied to projects utilizing M-CPC with different absorbers. • Optimizing of a multi-sectioned parabolic concentrator with a tubular absorber. • A visual C program was written to determine the optical performance. • The Visual C program results were verified by a laser experiment. • The results show some improvement over a standard parabolic concentrator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]