Determination of reflectance of interest from limited state-of-the-art solar reflector field soiling measurements

Abstract

In concentrated solar thermal technologies, plant operators usually monitor the soiling of their solar field with handheld reflectometers. These measurements can be used for yield calculations and to adapt cleaning strategies: if the reflectometer reading falls below an empirically established threshold, the solar field should be cleaned. There are several commercial reflectometers available for this purpose, but all of them measure at different combinations of wavelength, acceptance angle or incidence angle. It is the purpose of this study to bring the readings from all main commercial reflectometers to the same representative value, enabling their comparison with one another and the translation of these readings into a meaningful reflectance parameter. Thus, different handheld reflectometers are correlated with a laboratory reflectometer, capable of measuring in the whole solar spectral region, covering a wide range of incidence and acceptance angles. The most significant parameter is the near-specular solar-weighted reflectance, measured at the typical incidence and acceptance angles for a given plant, as it is the most precise parameter to describe the reflected energy from the solar field. The correlations for all included reflectometers, show highly linear correlations over a wide range of soiling levels with low deviations. Consequently, the correlations presented herein enable the plant operators at the studied site to compute the near-specular solar-weighted reflectance from their reflectometer readings. and, with that, increase the significance of the measurements without collecting any additional data. The work also establishes a detailed procedure to derive this type of correlations at any site of interest.