Survey of Solar Simulator Test Facilities and Initial Results of IEA Round Robin Tests Using Solar Simulators

摘要

The International Energy Agency (IEA) in cooperation with a number of participating countries investigates and evaluates standard solar collector test methods for the determination of the thermal performance of flat-plate solar collectors on an international basis. The thermal efficiency of two water heating flat-plate solar collectors (Chamberlain and Commercial Solar Energy) was obtained indoors using solar simulators. Solar simulators show good promise to potentially provide test results that are both reproducible and correlate well to outdoor performance. The use of a solar simulator is particularly attractive for testing a collector because each parameter may be varied independently to determine the full range of performance characteristics. However, future work has to be focussed on the identification of the performance features of solar simulators, because the differences found in the initial results of IEA round robin tests seem to be strongly associated with the functional characteristics of the solar simulators which were not sufficiently evaluated at this interim phase of the program. (ERA citation 10:004575)