We develop a solar simulator composed of multiple xenon arc lamps combined with a faceted paraboloidal dish concentrator to drive a Stirling engine in our laboratory for all-weather indoor testing.Experiments and numerical analysis are performed to determine the radiation flux and temperature distributions on the solar receiver surface.Based on the theoretical results,we present a receiver design for a solar Stirling engine with involute tubes closely conforming to the imaginary hemisphere to obtain a substantially uniform temperature field and a high solarthermal efficiency of 67.1%.