Applications

Meteorology: Climate Study and Long Term Monitoring / Modeling

The Earth’s radiation budget is a critical component of our weather and climate, atmospheric circulation and ocean currents. Therefore, reliable and accurate long term measurements of shortwave and longwave irradiance are essential for detecting climate change trends. This area has been the primary focus of The Eppley Laboratory for almost a century and our instruments have been in use around the globe. From grassy plains, rain forests, deserts, remote mountains, polar regions, equatorial regions, on aircraft and balloons, on ships and ocean buoys. Customers include Universities & Government Institutions from every continent and often working in cooperation with other institutions to create networks of stations that measure and study accurate, reliable, long term data sets of Solar & Atmospheric conditions.

Solar Power: Site Selection, Predictions and Performance Testing

There is tremendous interest in decreasing the world’s reliance on fossil fuel energy and increasing production of Alternative “Green” Energy such as Solar Power. Photovoltaic (PV) and Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) are two rapidly growing industries worldwide to meet these objectives. Accurate solar measurements are be used for determining the best site selections for the plants, for predicting solar inputs and for testing the performance of the plants based on the inputs.

In general, a PV site will mount a SPP or GPP Pyranometer in the plane of the PV array to measure the In Plane Irradiance (POA) with a growing interest in the In Plane Rearside Irraidance for BiFacial measurements. The CSP site will use the sNIP Pyrheliometer on the SMT Tracker to measure the Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI). Researchers will often also include a complete solar monitoring station to measure Global, Diffuse and Direct and Albedo.

Reference Cells:

Solar Reference (PV) Cells are made of the same materials used in PV Panels are are common for evaluating the performance of PV. However, different designs and constructions of Reference Cells result in different performance results due to temperature and spectral selectivity. Therefore, the SPP Pyranometer is used as a thermopile based standard for different Reference Cells to be compared with traceabilty to the World Radiation Reference (WRR).

Material Testing:

Testing of materials and systems of all types are performed with solar, UV and infrared measurements playing a critical role. These tests vary widely over many industries. Examples include color or material degradation due to UV exposure; performance testing on heating & cooling (AC) systems in buildings, automobiles, military vehicles, and aircraft; reflectance tests of low angled roofs or paving materials, improving bottling for soda, milk and other liquids. These tests can be done outdoors using the sun as the source or in Solar/Temperature Chambers in the lab and allow for repeating tests in multiple locations.