A novel flux mapping system for high-flux solar simulators based on the indirect method

It is an important and challenging work to measure the energy flux density distribution of the concentrated radiation during the concentrating solar power applications. In order to evaluate the performance of a multi-lamps high-flux solar simulator, a novel flux mapping system based on the indirect method has been developed. It features two Lambertian targets. One is a stationary water-cooled Lambertian target where there is a circular hole in the center used to install a flux sensor. The other is a movable Lambertian target used to cover the flux sensor when shooting the concentrated light beam image. This kind of design can obtain the gray value of flux sensor region directly and does not require the interpolation in the sensor-influencing area. The design theory and principle, the hardware implementation and the experimental validation of this flux mapping system have been presented in detail. The repeatability experiments and the error analyses showed that the total relative errors of this flux mapping system were +/- 8.1% with a repeatability of 1.1%, and +/- 8.5% with a repeatability of 2.7%, for evaluating the flux and the total radiant power, respectively.