Optimal design study of fixed-sun mirror field for tower solar thermal power plant

This paper mainly focuses on the optimal design of the heliostat field of the tower solar thermal power plant, and establishes the optical efficiency model and the layout scheme model to make the output power meet the demand, higher efficiency, and cost saving. Firstly, the atmospheric transmittance is obtained from the Euclidean distance and atmospheric transmittance formulae based on the solar mirror position, collector position and other parameters. The sun's altitude and azimuth are determined from the known geographic location data and the corresponding time point. Based on the solar altitude and azimuth angles and the above location parameters, the cosine loss can be directly solved by using the vectorial quantity product formula. The elevation angle and azimuth angle parameters of the heliostat are obtained by using the method of solving the normal direction angle of the plane reflector in three-dimensional space. Then establish the shadow shading efficiency calculation model and collector truncation model respectively and solve the shadow shading efficiency and collector truncation efficiency. Through the traversal algorithm, the optical efficiency and thermal power output per unit mirror area are obtained by summing and dividing by the number of mirrors sampled as well as the time value to obtain the monthly and yearly averages. The average annual optical efficiency was 49.1658% and the average annual thermal power output per unit area of mirror was 0.48 kw/m².