Heliostat Field Layout Design for Solar Tower Power Plant Based on GPU

摘要

A new method of heliostat field layout design is presented for solar tower power plant in this paper. In order to make the best use of a stretch of land, maximizing the product of the annual optical efficiency and the ground coverage is taken as the optimization objective in consideration of the conflict between them on the premise that the mechanical collision of adjacent heliostats is avoided for the specific land area and mirror size. Due to the large amount of computation, Monte Carlo ray tracing method based on Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) is utilized to calculate the annual optical efficiency of a solar tower power plant with high accuracy in a small amount of computation time. The design methods for two typical layout patterns including cornfield and radial stagger are proposed respectively and the effectiveness of the methods is verified by the optimization results of the field layout.