A review of optimized design layouts for solar power tower plants with campo code
By F. Collado, J. Guallar. 2013
220 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Solar power tower (SPT) systems are viewed as one of the most promising technologies for producing solar electricity, in which direct solar radiation is reflected and concentrated by a field of giant mirrors (heliostats) onto a receiver placed at the top of a tower. However, the optimized design of a heliostat field is a rather complex problem because the annual performance of a heliostat is a function of not only the instants of time considered and its own position, but also the relative location of neighbouring heliostats, which cause shadows and blockings. A variety of procedures may be found in the open literature, although there is great lack of information on the details of an optimized layout. This review shows that these complex problems have partially led to the expansion of parabolic trough technologies in USA and Spain in spite of their lower thermodynamic efficiencies compared with solar tower power. As a modest support of SPT systems, the authors have presented elsewhere the abilities of a new code called campo for fast and accurate calculations of the shadowing and blocking factor for each and every heliostat. This work explores a review of the optimized heliostat field layouts yielded by campo. Campo commences the optimization search based on the densest layout, with the worst shadowing and blocking factor, but with good values for the other optical factors, and then progresses towards gradually expanded distributions. The search for maximum annual energy through campo results in a clear, steady and reproducible procedure. Finally, as an example of this new procedure, some options of optimized heliostat field layouts are reviewed using as input parameters the scarce open literature data on Gemasolar, the first solar power tower commercial plant with molten salt storage in the world.
Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a90d86d279d916e92498584ab20d0fdfc200d38
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Novel hybrid CSP-biomass CHP for flexible generation: Thermo-economic analysis and profitability assessment (2017, background): “With respect to the latter, exhaustive computations for the solar efficiency including mirror area, spillage, blocking and shadowing effects, mirror-tracking strategies have been proposed in literature [24,36,37].”