Research on the Layout of Tower-type Concentrated Solar Power Plants Based on the Ray Tracing Method

Tower-type solar thermal power plants are favored by the industry for their high conversion efficiency and good commercial prospects. This paper focuses on the study of the optical energy transfer efficiency and thermal power output of the heliostat field in a tower-type solar thermal power plant. Firstly, based on the motion model of the sun and the earth, the ray tracing method is applied to investigate the path of mirror-reflected rays. Mathematical models are established for the optical efficiency, shading efficiency, cosine efficiency, truncation efficiency, and unit area thermal power output of the heliostat field. Based on these models, mathematical models for the optical energy transfer efficiency and thermal power output of the heliostat field are constructed, and the annual average thermal power output per unit mirror area of the solar thermal power plant is determined. Next, taking the maximum annual average thermal power output per unit mirror area of the heliostat field as the objective function, penalty functions are introduced to constrain the decision variables such as the height, width, and installation height of the heliostats. Finally, the objective function and penalty functions are incorporated into the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) for multiple iterations, yielding the maximum annual average thermal power output per unit mirror area of the heliostat field.