Facilities
Concentrated Solar Thermal Power (CSP/CST) laboratory entitled “ODAK,” located in the A-building of Mechanical Engineering Department of METU, consists of 2 regions, the main hall and a solar simulator room, with a total laboratory area of 200 m2. In the main hall, there are workspaces for 5 people and a parabolic trough collector simulator in a curtained and ventilated space. In the solar simulator room, there is a high flux solar simulator with three 6 kW Xenon short-arc lamps having a similar emission spectrum to the solar spectrum.
Using the solar simulator located in the ODAK laboratory, different concentration ratios can be achieved at a similar spectrum close to the solar spectrum. Thus,
- Prescreening of high-cost solar field experiments,
- Accelerated aging of materials,
- Thermal shock experiments,
- Experiments related to the life-cycle of materials,
- Uniform, large-area radiation experiments with porous materials,
- Photochemistry and photocatalysis experiments can be conducted.
The parabolic trough collector simulator can follow the specified temperature values throughout the day by circulating the heat transfer oil at the desired flow rate. Thus, fluid temperatures of existing solar collectors can be obtained in the laboratory environment.
Using the hot disc measurement equipment, the thermal conductivity of materials (by transient plane source, “TPS”, a technique in accordance with ISO22007-2) and the specific heat capacity can be measured.
