Recent satellite measurements have found the range of solar radiation flux at the mean Earth-Sun distance to be from 1365 to 1372 W/m², or 1368 W/m² to within ±0.5 percent. This regularity is considered sufficient to permit the use of solar radiation as a source of energy for inflight calibration of radiometers designed to detect electromagnetic radiation in the solar spectrum. But direct viewing of the Sun would provide a flux considerably greater than the operating range of radiometers designed to observe typical Earth scenes. Therefore an attenuator is required. The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) radiometers, operational since 1984, relied on a mirror attenuator mosaic (MAM) to attenuate the solar energy. The ERBE MAM is an array of 105 tightly packed concave spherical mirrors with a black mask covering the surface between the hemispherical cavities and partially covering the cavities themselves. In principle, the reflection of solar energy by the MAM was anticipated to be independent of the solar incidence direction. Unfortunately, flight data revealed a variation with a solar incidence angle of as much as 20 percent for flux arriving at the detector during solar calibration. An improvement of the ERBE MAM design, suppression of the black mask, and reduction of the surface area of the spherical mirrors, has been achieved for the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) radiometers, which will be operational sometime in the late-1990's.
The topic of this thesis is the creation of a thermal-radiative model, based on the Monte-Carlo ray-trace method, to characterize the performance of the CERES MAM. The radiative analysis suggests that the current CERES MAM design is still somewhat less than optimal. The desired specifications are that the fraction of solar energy reflected by the MAM to the radiometer aperture be independent of the solar vector, and that the distribution of this reflected energy be uniform across the entire surface area of the radiometer aperture. The work reported here establishes that these specifications can be met by a simple reorientation of the MAM diffuser plate. / Master of Science
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/43447 |
| Date | 23 June 2009 |
| Creators | Nguyen, Tai K. |
| Contributors | Mechanical Engineering |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | xvi, 253 leaves, BTD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 32378419, LD5655.V855_1994.N489.pdf |
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