Experimental and numerical characterization of a new 45 kW_el multisource high-flux solar simulator

Abstract

Abstract:The performance of a new high-flux solar simulator consisting of 18 × 2.5 kW el radiation modules has been evaluated. Grayscale images of the radiative flux distribution at the focus are acquired for each module individually using a water-cooled Lambertian target plate and a CCD camera. Raw images are corrected for dark current, normalized by the exposure time and calibrated with local absolute heat flux measurements to produce radiative flux maps with 180 µm resolution. The resulting measured peak flux is 1.0-1.5 ± 0.2 MW m −2 per radiation module and 21.7 ± 2 MW m −2 for the sum of all 18 radiation modules. Integrating the flux distribution for all 18 radiation modules over a circular area of 5 cm diameter yields a mean radiative flux of 3.8 MW m −2 and an incident radiative power of 7.5 kW. A Monte Carlo ray-tracing simulation of the simulator is calibrated with the experimental results. The agreement between experimental and numerical results is characterized in terms of a 4.2% difference in peak flux and correlation coefficients of 0.9990 and 0.9995 for the local and mean radial flux profiles, respectively. The best-fit simulation parameters include the lamp efficiency of 39.4% and the mirror surface error of 0.85 mrad. suns high-flux solar simulator based on an array of xenon arc lamps,"

Thermochemical H2O and CO2 splitting redox cycles in a NiFe2O4 structured redox reactor: Design, development and experiments in a high flux solar simulator

“…Solar simulators are mainly employed for testing components, materials and reactors for high temperature thermal and thermochemical applications such as redox cycles for solar fuels research. Several of these high power and high flux solar simulators for high temperature solar thermochemical experiments exist worldwide (Kuhn and Hunt, 1991;Jaworske et al, 1996;Hirsch et al, 2003;Guesdon et al, 2006;Petrasch et al, 2006;Codd et al, 2010;Alxneit and Dibowski, 2011;Krueger et al, 2011;Erickson, 2012;Nakakura et al, 2015;Li et al, 2014;Dimitrakis et al, 2013;Sarwar et al, 2014;Wang et al, 2014;Levêque et al, 2016; http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10202/ 334_read-21807/#/gallery/26638/, 2017). An overview of existing high power solar simulators is presented in Table 2.…”

Hazards Caused by UV Rays of Xenon Light Based High Performance Solar Simulators

“…This does not lead to the conclusion that lower amounts of radiation do not need the same degree of protection than in bigger facilites. In every case one should avoid any windowed surfaces, use cameras as the only means to monitor the experimental space, use metal lining on simulator enclosures, control ducting and ventilation of the simulator enclosure, and other recommendations like [3] , [5] or [20] .…”

High-flux optical systems for solar thermochemistry

“…Different lamp models have been used to describe the origin and direction of the light emitted by the lamps. The spatial emission distribution inside the lamp has been modelled as a uniformly emitting cylindrical volume, conical or spherical surface, or combination of multiple spherical and cylindrical surfaces Levêque et al, 2016). Due to the strongly non-uniform brightness distribution in actual solar simulator lamps, these models tend to result in an underprediction of the peak flux and an over-prediction of the radiative power incident on the target surface.…”

“…Due to the strongly non-uniform brightness distribution in actual solar simulator lamps, these models tend to result in an underprediction of the peak flux and an over-prediction of the radiative power incident on the target surface. The directional emission distribution of the lamp is either modelled as isotropic or by using measured data (Petrasch et al, 2007;Levêque et al, 2016;Bader et al, 2014a;Krueger et al, 2011). Using the actual angular emission distribution of the lamp allows to design a reflector that intercepts nearly all radiation emitted by the lamp and leads to a better prediction of the lamp-to-target radiation transfer efficiency.…”