Monte Carlo ray-tracing approach to effectively design the ellipsoidal reflector of solar simulators

Solar simulators are widely adopted devices to artificially reproduce the emission spectrum of the Sun. Their use, in lab tests and analyses, allows to study the effect of solar radiation on both materials and components. This paper focuses on the effective design of the ellipsoidal reflector for concentrating solar simulators. A Monte Carlo ray-tracing approach is proposed to study the reflector geometric configuration maximizing the target incident radiation and optimizing the radiative incident flux distribution. Developed raytracing model includes the main physical and optic phenomena affecting light rays from the source to the target area, e.g. absorption, deviation, reflection, distortion, etc. Proposed model is integrated to a Monte Carlo simulation to properly design the ellipsoidal mirror reflector of a small scale solar simulator based on an OSRAM XBO® 3000W/HTC OFR Xenon short arc lamp as light emitting source. Several scenarios are tested and the main obtained evidences are summarized.