Study on the radiative heat transfer characteristics of one solar simulator

One high-flux solar simulator facility has been developed for all-weather indoor testing of dish/Stirling solar power generation system. This solar simulator composed of multiple xenon arc lamps combined with a faceted paraboloidal dish concentrator. The Monte-Carlo ray-tracing method is utilized to predict the radiation flux distributions of the concentrator-receiver system, and the numerical result is validated by experiment, the deviation of total radiation flux in the focal receiver between the experimental data and the ray-tracing results is about 0.32%. Then the radiation flux profiles on the receiver surface for faceted real concentrator and ideal paraboloidal concentrator are analyzed respectively. The results indicated that a faceted concentrator combined with 12 Xe-arc lamps can provided uniform irradiance on the receiver surface, it is beneficial for the long-term reliable and efficient operation of the stirling engine. The designed solar simulator can provide enough radiation power at the receiver aperture. It can be used as an experiment platform for stirling engine.