Aiming Strategy for a Circular Aperture Receiver: Experimental Validation at PROTEAS

Abstract

An aiming strategy is developed for a circular aperture receiver at the PROTEAS field in Cyprus. To reduce thermal stress, a uniform flux distribution is searched by minimizing the coefficient of variation and the spillage losses. The combination of k=0.9 and damp=0.85 produces the optimal flux distribution, at the expense of increasing the spillage losses by 21.8 percentage points. To validate the model, heliostat images were utilized to synthetically generate experimental flux maps, both for single and optimized aiming. As a result, the peak flux concentration is decreased from 1090 (single-point aiming) to 367 suns with the uniform distribution.