A Review on Heliostat Field Layout and Control Strategy of Solar Tower Thermal Power Plants

Abstract

Under the background of increasing greenhouse effect and decreasing fossil energy, renewable energy power generation has been drawn increasing attention by almost all countries in the world, and especially the solar thermal power generation has received much attention in recent years. As a solar energy utilization pattern different from the photovoltaic power generation, the solar thermal power generation has the advantages such as higher stability and larger scale that other kinds of renewable energy power generations do not have. However, for the current solar thermal power plants, the higher cost of the initial construction and lower concentration efficiency have become obstacles to its advancement in the power generation industry. As a crucial subsystem of the solar thermal power plants, the heliostat subsystem not only occupies nearly half of the cost of the solar thermal power plants, but also directly determines the concentration efficiency of the solar thermal power plants. Therefore, how to reduce the cost of the heliostat field, and distribute and control the heliostat at the same time, so that it can accurately and effectively track the sun in real time, which is one of most important problems. In this paper, a summarize of the current researches on the methods for improving power generation efficiency is given for the heliostat part of the solar tower thermal power plants.