By: Dr. Jerry Webb, retired UAM Professor of Physics
A few years ago a senior physics major came to me and wanted a project. I said why don’t we measure the solar constant? He asked me jokingly, “What’s that?” The solar constant is the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun per unit area per unit time. Its units would be something like ft-lbs per hour per square foot. It is a very important figure in things like photo-electronics. The young man was very interested and I began explaining to him what we would have to do. The young man built a parabolic reflector. A parabolic reflector is one that reflects all the sunlight striking it back through a single point. We mounted the reflector on a telescope mount so that we could follow the sun for a period of several hours. We had a long tube with water flowing through it. From the flow rate and the temperature difference between the inlet and the outlet, we could calculate the solar constant. I do not recall the numbers but our results were very close to the accepted value. The young man that this story is about completed his degree at UAM and went to Kent State for his PhD. The last report I had on him was that he was working at Los Alamos Laboratory, which is the top ranked research laboratory in the country.
