A review of optimized design layouts for solar power tower plants with campo code

Abstract

a b s t r a c t 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.

Off-design performance of concentrated solar heat and coal double-source boiler power generation with thermocline energy storage

“…Since the weather data are recorded hourly, the value of DNI for each 15 minutes must be recalculated by the interpolation method, with the consideration of the difference between the solar time and local time.In the real operation of SPT, the day time usually means a minimum of 15˚ of sun elevation over the horizon line, so the sunshine in Fig. 4(a) with elevation angle less than 15˚has to be filtered [38]. The annual DNI distribution after recalculationwithin day time is shown in Fig.…”

Evaluating the potential energy of a heliostat field and solar receiver of solar tower power plants in the southern region of Turkey

“…Several codes have been produced since the 70s for estimating ideal layouts; and most of those codes are presented in (Garcia 2008). For the most part, the most recent codes (Chiesi 2013, Noone 2012, Collado, 2013, Besarati 2014) identify various forms of access to increase the global optical efficiency ( ), which the present study depends on, to estimate the optical performance of the field. The main purpose of this work is to apply software simulations, a dynamic simulation developed in MATLAB, and consider all average days in the year, as presented in (American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Airconditioning Engineers) (ASHRAE 2013), within a specified interval time, to study the potential of SPTP technology through a hypothetical relocation of Seville, Spain's Gemasolar SPTP to regions in the south of Turkey (Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, and Finike).…”

“…For instance, Amadei (2013) studied the hypothetical relocation of the same plant to different Chinese regions through software simulation (Solar Advisor Model, SAM). Collado (2013) also studied the optimization of the heliostat field by adopting radially staggered distribution with an implemented Campo code, and estimated the maximum annual energy with a new layout suggested. In the present study, each mirror position is specified by utilizing the layouts of the MIT team model (Noone 2012), while two parameters of this model settle down the layout outline of the reflectors, estimated by used an optimization algorithm.…”

Optimization of multiple receivers solar power tower systems

“…There exist different proposals in the literature for spatial configurations of multiple receivers: vertical [28], circular [7,14,15], same focal spot [9] and horizontal, see [29,31] and Figure 1. In our approach a horizontal distribution is considered where each receiver is characterized by its own height in the tower, aperture tilt angle, azimuth angle and aperture radius.…”