Heliostat Field Design Using Visualization Method for Optical Heliostat Interaction

For the heliostat field design, the optical interaction of heliostat by shadowing and blocking should be considered besides cosine efficiency. In the present study, in order to visualize the optical interaction it is enabled to visualize the power loss image due to a poor heliostat layout. The optical interaction area among the two heliostats is calculated for several hundreds of pairs between the given heliostat and the surrounding heliostats which are virtually seated around the given heliostat. The resultant plot gives a power loss distribution around the given heliostat. An approximation method to calculate the heliostat distribution was applied for the visualization method for a remarkable time reduction for calculation. The magnitude of the interference can be seen easily from the area where the both borders of the optical interaction areas are overlapped. And the arrangement calculation method using the power loss distribution and the cosine efficiency distribution is proposed, which gives theoretically better heliostat field layouts.