Experimental and numerical characterization of a new 45 kWel multisource high-flux solar simulator

The performance of a new high-flux solar simulator consisting of 18 x 2.5 kW(el) radiation modules has been evaluated. Grayscale images of the radiative flux distribution at the focus are acquired for each module individually using a water-cooled Lambertian target plate and a CCD camera. Raw images are corrected for dark current, normalized by the exposure time and calibrated with local absolute heat flux measurements to produce radiative flux maps with 180 mu m resolution. The resulting measured peak flux is 1.0-1.5 +/- 0.2 MW m(-2) per radiation module and 21.7 +/- 2 MW m(-2) for the sum of all 18 radiation modules. Integrating the flux distribution for all 18 radiation modules over a circular area of 5 cm diameter yields a mean radiative flux of 3.8 MW m(-2) and an incident radiative power of 7.5 kW. A Monte Carlo ray-tracing simulation of the simulator is calibrated with the experimental results. The agreement between experimental and numerical results is characterized in terms of a 4.2% difference in peak flux and correlation coefficients of 0.9990 and 0.9995 for the local and mean radial flux profiles, respectively. The best-fit simulation parameters include the lamp efficiency of 39.4% and the mirror surface error of 0.85 mrad. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America