Design of the Heliostat Field of the CSIRO Solar Tower

Abstract

A close-packed heliostat field of more than 800 m2 reflector area has been installed by Solar Heat and Power for the CSIRO solar tower at the Energy Centre in Newcastle, Australia. The heliostat field has been designed with significantly greater field packing density than normally associated with heliostat fields. It can be shown that even though a heliostat field with a high ground coverage exhibits more blocking and shading, a higher annual performance can be achieved up to a certain point. The optimum ground coverage calculated for the CSIRO solar tower configuration is in the range of 53%. Other heliostat field designs usually have ground coverage below 30%. The annual optical performance of the CSIRO field per square meters of reflector is about 9% higher than a radial stagger field of 30% ground coverage for a research tower, which was optimized to have the highest performance for the time frame from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.

An optimization tool to design the field of a solar power tower plant allowing heliostats of different sizes

“…5, 1], given in . Therefore, as can also be appreciated in Figure , this region (near the tower) is, in principle, the most favourable to locate heliostats, and a higher density of heliostats is expected there, as pointed out in .…”

“…At the same time, the optical design is influenced by the cost (manufacturing and assembly processes, canting, installation, calibration, etc.) and wind loads among others; see [4][5][6][7][8].…”

“…For the single-size-heliostat field design problem to be solved, there exist several algorithms in the literature [11]. Efficient single-size-heliostat fields have been designed with large or big heliostats (148 m 2 ATS [4], 121 m 2 Sanlucar [12], 116 m 2 Sener [13]) and also using small or micro heliostats (16 m 2 AORA Solar and Heliko-DLR [4], 7.5 m 2 [14], 4.3 m 2 SHP-CSIRO [7]).…”

Optimization of multiple receivers solar power tower systems

“…Multi-Towers configurations are also an interesting innovation in SPT systems, see [30]. The calculation of the optimal towers positions and the aiming strategies to be applied are the major additional difficulties, which may be addressed by a repeated application of the methods presented here.…”

Heliostat Field Layout Optimization with Evolutionary Algorithms

“…Thus, the pattern method essentially determines the best adaptation of the pattern for the problem and not necessarily the best x-y coordinates for optimal plant performance [6]. In literature, several different patterns have been used: rows [11], radial staggered [5], and biomimetic patterns [7]. The disadvantage of these optimizers is the small search space by construction.…”