The backward ray tracing with effective solar brightness used to simulate the concentrated flux map of a solar tower concentrator

Abstract

The solar tower concentrator is mainly composed of the central receiver on the tower top and the heliostat field around the tower. The optical efficiencies of a solar tower concentrator are important to the whole thermal performance of the solar tower collector, and the aperture plane of a cavity receiver or the (inner or external) absorbing surface of any central receiver is a key interface of energy flux. So it is necessary to simulate and analyze the concentrated time-changing solar flux density distributions on the flat or curved receiving surface of the collector, with main optical errors considered. The transient concentrated solar flux on the receiving surface is the superimposition of the flux density distributions of all the normal working heliostats in the field. In this paper, we will mainly introduce a new backward ray tracing (BRT) method combined with the lumped effective solar cone, to simulate the flux density map on the receiving-surface. For BRT, bundles of rays are launched at the receiving-surface points of interest, strike directly on the valid cell centers among the uniformly sampled mirror cell centers in the mirror surface of the heliostats, and then direct to the effective solar cone around the incident sun beam direction after reflection. All the optical errors are convoluted into the effective solar cone. The brightness distribution of the effective solar cone is here supposed to be circular Gaussian type. The mirror curvature can be adequately formulated by certain number of local normal vectors at the mirror cell centers of a heliostat. The shading & blocking mirror region of a heliostat by neighbor heliostats and also the solar tower shading on the heliostat mirror are all computed on the flat-ground-plane platform, i.e., projecting the mirror contours and the envelope cylinder of the tower onto the horizontal ground plane along the sun-beam incident direction or along the reflection directions. If the shading projection of a sampled mirror point of the current heliostat is inside the shade cast of a neighbor heliostat or in the shade cast of the tower, this mirror point should be shaded from the incident sun beam. A code based on this new ray tracing method for the 1MW Badaling solar tower power plant in Beijing has been developed using MATLAB. There are 100 azimuth-elevation tracking heliostats in the solar field and the total tower is 118 meters high. The mirror surface of the heliostats is 10m wide and 10m long, it is composed of 8 rows × 8 columns of square mirror facets and each mirror facet has the size of 1.25m×1.25m. This code also was verified by two sets of sun-beam concentrating experiments of the heliostat field on the June 14, 2015. One set of optical experiments were conducted between some typical heliostats to verify the shading & blocking computation of the code, since shading & blocking computation is the most complicated, time-consuming and important optical computing section of the code. The other set of solar concentrating tests were carried out on the field center heliostat (No. 78) to verify the simulated the solar flux images on the white target region of the northern wall of the tower. The target center is 74.5 m high to the ground plane.