Investigations into the spiral distribution of the heliostat field in solar central tower system

Moreover, several efforts are carried out aiming at accelerating the optimization process by reducing the two variables optimization, as the case in typical spiral algorithm optimization using PSO, into a single variable optimization, thus, eliminating the need for PSO technique. For example, a correlation between the optimal values of the shape factors “a” and “b” in the spiral distribution algorithm is established. Results of this action showed that the changes in field characteristics are less than 1%. Finally, the effect of changing the angular position constant in the spiral field pattern (the constant related to the golden ratio) on the field performance is investigated, and, it is found that the system performance is very sensitive to this constant, however, improvement of field efficiency is achieved using different values for this constant.