Concentration of off-axis radiation by solar concentrators for space power

Author

Jefferies, Kent S.

Author_Institution

NASA Lewis Res. Center, Cleveland, OH, USA

fYear

1989

fDate

6-11 Aug 1989

Firstpage

887

Abstract

Four types of off-axis radiation are discussed. These are small off-axis angles during walk-off, large off-axis angles, an extended off-axis source such as Earth albedo, and miscellaneous off-axis sources including radiofrequency sources and local point sources. A code name OFFSET has been developed to represent the solar concentrator being developed for Space Station Freedom. It is a detailed ray-tracing model which represents 50 ray-originating points on the Sun and reflections from 10 points on each of the 456 concentrator facets. Results of this code are generally similar to the PIXEL results although there are small differences due to the more detailed representations of the Sun and concentrator that were used in the OFFSET code

Keywords

solar energy concentrators; space vehicle power plants; Earth albedo; OFFSET; Space Station Freedom; local point sources; off-axis radiation; radiofrequency sources; ray-tracing model; solar concentrators; space power; Earth; Heat engines; Optical reflection; Power system dynamics; Power systems; Radio frequency; Ray tracing; Solar energy; Space stations; Sun;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, 1989. IECEC-89., Proceedings of the 24th Intersociety

Conference_Location

Washington, DC

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IECEC.1989.74574

Filename

74574