International Journal of Energy Research, Vol.41, No.8, 1096-1107, 2017
An optimization tool to design the field of a solar power tower plant allowing heliostats of different sizes
The design of a solar power tower plant involves the optimization of the heliostat field layout. Fields are usually designed to have all heliostats of identical size. Although the use of a single heliostat size has been questioned in the literature, there are no tools to design fields with heliostats of several sizes at the same time. In this paper, the problem of optimizing the heliostat field layout of a system with heliostats of different sizes is addressed. We present an optimization tool to design solar plants allowing two heliostat sizes. The methodology is illustrated with a particular example considering different heliostat costs. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords:solar thermal power tower;field layout;multi-size-heliostat field;heuristic algorithm;greedy algorithm