Design and experimental study of a 30 kWe adjustable solar simulator delivering high and uniform flux

Abstract To make a good compromise between the flux uniformity and the high peak flux of the light spot, a new high-flux solar simulator (HFSS) with the continuously adjustable input power of 6–30 kWe was designed and studied in this paper. In the design, three 10 kWe xenon arc lamps, which can provide good solar-like irradiation, were selected as the light sources, and the lamps were reasonably arranged in the HFSS to achieve the high peak flux. Meanwhile, a kind of non-coaxial ellipsoidal reflector was specifically designed to concentrate the irradiation of each lamp and reduce the flux non-uniformity of the light spot. After the design and construction, an indirect measurement method was employed to determine the performance of the HFSS. Firstly, error analysis of the method indicatesd that the measured errors of the flux and the accumulated power are 7.9% and 8.0%, respectively, which are reasonable and acceptable. Then, sensitivity analysis of photo quantity recommended that the average greyscale of light spot obtained from 10 raw photos are accurate enough for data processing. Finally, the measuring results demonstrated that the flux distributions of the individual lamp and the HFSS both show good uniformity. As the input power of the HFSS increases from 6 kWe to 30 kWe, the system efficiency increases from 26.22% to 31.78%. The corresponding accumulated power within a 100 mm diameter light spot increases from 1.573 kW to 9.534 kW, and the peak flux reaches 1.709 MW·m−2 to 8.568 MW·m−2 under different input power. The good flux uniformity and the highest peak flux of 8.568 MW·m−2 indicated that this HFSS can satisfy the requirement of indoor CSP experiments. The contradiction between high flux and good flux uniformity was solved effectively, and the performance of the HFSS was boosted significantly. Therefore, the designed HFSS can be suitable and practical for the CSP experiments.