A 130 kWe solar simulator with tunable ultra-high flux and characterization using direct multiple lamps mapping

Abstract

The indoor solar simulator is an excellent supply device for high solar flux applications, but usually suffers from the low flux under a large light area and unadjustable light distribution. In this work, a 130 kWe indoor solar simulator with tunable ultra-high flux in a projection area of 200 mm diameter is designed and established. 13 of 10 kWe xenon short-arc lamps and reflectors are coupled to make the flux be concentrated to a spot. Besides, a direct measure system consisting of a Gardon gauge and a two-dimensional moving unit is proposed to map the flux distribution. The expanded uncertainty is 7.46% with a converge factor of 2, compared with the conventional indirect camera-based method with an error up to 50%. Up to 7 lamps are simultaneously measured. The Monte Carlo method is adopted to analyze flux distributions of individual lamps as well as the whole lamp group, which coincides well with the experimental data. When the input electric power is 11.12 kW, the electric-to-light conversion efficiency is 31.60% ± 2.36% on the focus plane. The peak flux reaches 11.267 ± 1.571 MW/m2 and a mean flux amounts to 1.054 ± 0.079 MW/m2 in a projection area of 200 mm diameter. Both the distribution and non-uniformity of irradiation flux are tunable. By reducing the power of the central lamp to the half and defocusing the target, the distribution non-uniformity of the light intensity can be remarkably reduced from 68.87% to 18.59% in a projection area of 60 mm diameter. The developed device will provide a reliable source for indoor experiments.