In this presentation, the development of a 25KWe High Flux Solar Simulator (HFSS) model with variable flux profile capability will be discussed. The HFSS model consists of ten 2.5KW metal halide lamps, each mounted at the focal point of an ellipsoidal reflector. The novel variability in flux profile is useful in achieving different ranges of temperature with different flux profile configurations that can be used for a wide range of solar thermal, thermochemical, and photovoltaic research applications. The variation in the flux profile of the HFSS model is achieved by changing the angle of the lamp module with respect to the target, the distance between the arc of the bulb relative to the focal point of the reflector and by varying the power of the lamps. Trace-Pro, a ray-tracing simulation software is used to analyze the variation in the flux profile with respect to the parameters of the HFSS model, and a relationship is determined. This relationship is used to develop the optimization model using a trust region reflective algorithm, to obtain the optimal configuration of the HFSS model. The objective of the optimization model is to reduce the sum of the squared difference between the user-defined flux profile and the flux profile of the HFSS model, obtained by varying its parameters. Several user-defined flux profile configurations are tested. The optimization model was able to approximate the user-defined flux profile within the achievable limits of the solar simulator. Thus, reducing the effort in manually adjusting the parameters of the high flux solar simulator.


Variable Flux Profile Optimization of a High Flux Solar Simulator

Division / Sponsor:
Advanced Energy Systems Division (AESD) & Solar Energy Division (SED)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ES/ES2020/volume/83631

ES2020 - Virtual Conference 

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.