SOLFAST, a Ray-Tracing Monte-Carlo software for solar concentrating facilities

Roccia, Jean-Patrick; Piaud, Benjamin; Coustet, Christophe; Caliot, Cyril; Guillot, Emmanuel; Flamant, Gilles; Delatorre, J.

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/369/1/012029

Cited by 32 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…There are many ray tracers available either publicly (SolTrace, Tonatiuh [39], Tracer [40]) or commercially (e.g., HFLCAL, SPRAY, SOLFAST [41]) based on MCRT technology as discussed by [42] and [43]. They can be used in isolation to evaluate the optical performance of receivers thereby providing the solar load distribution on a candidate absorber geometry.…”

Section: Monte Carlo Ray Tracing (Mcrt)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Finite-volume ray tracing using Computational Fluid Dynamics in linear focus CSP applications

et al. 2016

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The modelling of solar irradiation in concentrated solar power (CSP) applications is traditionally done with ray-tracing methods, e.g. the Monte Carlo method. For the evaluation of CSP receivers, the results from ray-tracing codes are typically used to provide boundary conditions to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes for the solution of conjugate heat transfer in the receivers. There are both advantages and disadvantages to using separate software for the irradiation and heat transfer modelling. For traditional ray-tracing methods, advantages are the cost-effectiveness of the Monte Carlo method in modelling reflections from specular surfaces; the ability to statistically assign a sun shape to the rays; the statistical treatment of reflectivity and optical errors (e.g. surface slope errors), to name a few. When considering a complex mirror field and a complex receiver with secondary reflective surfaces, especially with selective coatings to enhance absorption and limit re-radiation losses, standard ray tracers may be limited in specifying emissivity and absorptivity, which are both specular and temperature dependent, and are hence not suitable as radiation analysis tool. This type of scenario can be modelled accurately using CFD, through the finite volume (FV) treatment of the radiative transfer equation (RTE) and a banded spectrum approach at an increased computational cost. This paper evaluates the use of CFD in the form of the commercial CFD code ANSYS Fluent v15 and v16 to model the reflection, transmission and absorption of solar irradiation from diffuse and specular surfaces found in linear CSP applications. 2-D CFD solutions were considered, i.e. line concentration. To illustrate and validate the method, two sources were used. The first source was test cases from literature with published solutions and the second a combined modelling approach where solutions were obtained using both FV and ray tracing (with SolTrace). For all the test cases, good agreement was found when suitable modelling settings were used to limit both ray-effect and false scattering errors.

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Section: Monte Carlo Ray Tracing (Mcrt)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Finite-volume ray tracing using Computational Fluid Dynamics in linear focus CSP applications

et al. 2016

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“…been developed as multi-purpose tools: Tonatiuh, developed at CENER, SolTrace, developed at NREL, initially released in 2003 and updated in 2013, and SolFast, developed at CNRS (Blanco et al, 2005;Wendelin et al, 2013;Roccia et al, 2012). In addition, a number of commercial software packages exists that can be used to model solar optical systems.…”

Section: Monte Carlo Ray Tracing Codesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Comparisons among some of the simulation codes mentioned above have been conducted in the last years (Roccia et al, 2012;Garcia et al, 2008). A recent overview of available optical simulation tools for solar concentrating systems is provided in Li et al (2016).…”

Section: Monte Carlo Ray Tracing Codesmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-flux optical systems for solar thermochemistry

et al. 2017

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a b s t r a c tHigh-flux optical systems (HFOSs) are optical concentrators used to increase the radiative flux of the natural terrestrial solar irradiation. High radiative flux concentration leads to high energy density in solar receivers which allows to obtain high temperatures. In solar thermochemical applications, the hightemperature heat drives endothermic thermochemical reactions. HFOSs have been deployed for research and development of solar thermochemical devices and systems, from solar reacting media to solar reactors. Here, we review the designs and characteristics of HFOSs as well as challenges and opportunities in the area of high-flux optical systems for solar thermochemical applications.

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“…The reflected angle is equal to the incident angle, as presented in vector form in Eq. (14). The refracted angle # 00 of the specular refraction depends on the refractive indices of both media and is given by Snell's law:…”

Section: Semi-transparent Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The other approach is to implement explicit calculation of the radiation intensities, which also include the directional information, and makes it possible to model the light piping. The typical representatives of such numerical methods are the discrete-ordinates method [11] and the Monte Carlo ray-tracing method [12][13][14], which are implemented in several commercial and free software tools, but each is optimized for the particular application, for example emissivity calculation or simulation of solar concentrating facilities. A specialized tool for modeling of radiation effects in fixed-point cells is therefore required in order to perform the simulation efficiently.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%