Modelling and simulation of a central solar power tower plant

A novel heliostat field layout is suggested by dividing specified heliostats located farthest from the tower and exhibiting low optical efficiency into strips and increasing the height for these strips with varying heights, based on the consideration of no blocking. A novel geometrical equation is presented for this purpose, and the results indicate an increase in the total annual efficiency of the field. Furthermore, shading and blocking are considered one of the main causes that result in the drop of the optical performance of the heliostat fields. In this study, we suggest through the simulation, an accurate and fast framework to enhance the optical performance of the solar field with the existence of the shading and blocking. By practicing the new style, running down the implementation time and keeping off unnecessary computations, our framework increases the speed of the computations through parallel computing architectures, then using the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to investigate the efficiency of our proposed system. A prior study on the performance of high-efficient models for a heliostat field and solar receiver at various candidate locations (e.g., certain regions in the south of Turkey) helped determine suitable locations for installing solar tower power plant units. This study considered the fact that solar tower power plants are affected by the working conditions of a particular site, which helps realize the highest performance of the solar power tower plant. An optimized heliostat field consisting of 2650 SENER heliostats and a model of a solar receiver based on the data obtained using Gemasolar in Seville, Spain, was used as a reference in this work.