Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
7164716 | Energy Conversion and Management | 2014 | 9 Pages |
Abstract
In this paper, we firstly propose an analytical equation to calculate the energy collected by the heliostat field. A ray tracing method is developed based on the analytical equation. Then we introduce three approximations to reduce computation spending, and estimate the errors caused by these approximations. A fast and accurate algorithm is developed with the three approximations to calculate the energy collected by the heliostat field over a year. It was compared with the ray tracing results, which shows good consistency with them. With the method, the energy collected and efficiency of each heliostat in a year can be computed exactly and rapidly, the difference between the method and ray tracing method is less than 0.1% for the energy collected by a heliostat over a day. It needs only about 0.1% computation time used by ray tracing method to calculate the intercept factor of a heliostat at a moment, and 2.67Â h to compute the annual collected energy of PS10 heliostat field by using one CPU of i3 processor when the time span for integration is 5Â min and each heliostat is calculated.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Energy
Energy (General)
Authors
Weidong Huang, Qian Xu,