Laboratory Space and Equipment
The Solar Energy Laboratory occupies 1400 square feet of the tenth floor in
the Mechanical Engineering Building on the university campus. It includes a small classroom, a solar thermal collector test facility, a solar cooling system,
and computer acquisition and processing equipment for the Texas Solar
Radiation Data Base project. The roof of the building has
been designed to accomodate equipment for a variety of solar research
experiments. Current equipment, grouped by category, includes:
- Solar Thermal
- A 1.2 ton Yazaki absorption unit and two hundred square foot
collector array
- Solar (thermal) collector test facility
- A five foot diameter parabolic dish on a two-axis mount
- Solar Photovoltaics
- A five hundred Watt solar photovoltaic array
- Power conditioning equipment
- Solar Radiation Monitoring
- Eppley global pyranometer, normal incidence pyheliometer on
tracker, and pyranometer with shadowband to obtain individual global
horizontal, direct normal, and diffuse horizontal solar radiation
measurements
- NREL supplied Eppley pyranometers (two), pyheliometer, and SCI-TEC
tracker with rotating shadow ball to obtain the global, diffuse, and
direct normal components
- Eppley instruments (pyranometers and filters) for broad-band spectral
measurements
- Instruments at fourteen other solar stations around the state for
local measurements, linked by telephone to the laboratory,
including:
-
ten rotating shadowband pyranometers (Ascension Technology) each with an air
temperature
sensor, datalogger, modem, photovoltaic module, and battery
- four SCI-TEC trackers with two Epply global pyranometers
(one with shadowball for horizontal diffuse measurements) and a normal
incidence pyheliometer
- Computer Hardware and Software
- A DOS platform computer with modem for solar radiation data
acquisition, and communication with CR10X dataloggers
- A DOS platform computer with an ethernet connection, and
multiple hard drives for solar radiation data processing and storage
- PC208e software for datalogger programming, and data
collection
- DQMS software for database management and data processing
- SERI-QC software for solar radiation data quality control
analysis