Be very clear about exactly what you want to measure, and how accurately. Let us assume that the meter has been calibrated using either the sun or a solar simulator and meets its published specification. The reading you get on the meter will be some function of the total energy it is receiving at any time. This function will be spectrally dependent, and if this dependency is different from that of some solar absorber you are researching, you will not get totally consistent readings at different times of the day, because the solar spectrum will change due to changes in the sun elevation and atmospheric absorption and scattering. It depends exactly what you want to do with it, and what your research is.
Dr. Tony Maine
Thank you very much for your answer.
I have a group of undergraduate students working to finish their graduation project, in which part of the work is measuring the total solar radiation on horizontal plane in order to calculate the efficiency of collecting the solar energy by an evacuated solar tube. The evacuated solar tube is taken from a solar collector of water in glass type. The evacuated solar tubes were made in China and I already found the thermo-physical properties in some published papers.
There is no sun simulator in our department. Most of the measuring instruments and metering devices among them the pyranometers we had in our mechanical engineering department were either destroyed or lost because of the war.
We have to buy a commercial solar power meter from the internet. Most the available hand hold or portable solar meter are equipped with sensor attached to the meter body and only few models are equipped with separate sensor connected to the meter via a cable. Actually I had no experience in using these commercial solar meters.
So I think after the explanation above the situation became obvious, and I hope you now can answer my question more accurate.
Again thank you very much.
More to that the various values obtained are usually accurate at about 85 % to 90 %. Meaning while working always consider that margin in other to have very good results.
Calibrate it , then use it. Don't forget the error percentages during calibration and using.
Yes, such portable solar irradiance meters are accurate enough for the purpose of the study of your students. They can also consider to use the stated tolerance of the meter for identifying the range of a reading (high, and low values) instead of its shown crisp value on the display.
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