Efficient Ray-Tracing Program to Simulate the Optical Performance of Heliostats in Concentrated Solar Power Facilities
Abstract
A dedicated ray-tracing program, specifically designed for assessing the heliostat optical performance of concentrated solar power facilities, is developed in Matlab. The program allows for simulations with different heliostat field layout configurations. In the investigation presented here, we perform a detailed comparison between our program and a commercially available ray-tracing software (TracePro71®). For this purpose, the layout of the concentrated solar power facility located at IMDEA Energy in Móstoles (Spain) is used as a test-case. We show that the simulations of flux distributions on the target given by our program agree very well with that of the commercial software, but the computation time is significantly reduced when matrices of slope errors are used. In fact, much faster simulations are obtained for individual heliostats, for which our program outperforms the commercial software in at least a factor of 10 for the same conditions. Furthermore, simulated flux maps with both software show an excellent agreement with the corresponding experimental flux map.