A new heliostat field optimal design strategy for deformable petal hybrid layout of concentrated solar power via multi-algorithm filtering

Xin-Yuan Tang, Wei-Wei Yang, Jia-Chen Li, Lan-Xin Liang, Yi-Wan Lin and Ya-Ling He

Renewable Energy, 2025, vol. 243, issue C

Abstract: A new optimization method was proposed to design high-performance deformable petal heliostat fields for concentrated solar power. The petal field was divided into individual sectors, each separately designed to balance pattern orderliness and flexibility. A suitable high-dimensional optimization algorithm was identified from 129 different algorithms using multi-algorithm filtering. To examine the proposed method, four petal field layouts (campo-only, spiral-only, and their north-south combinations) were tested on Gemasolar-20MW and Haixi-50MW fields. Two annual optical efficiency optimization strategies were employed: maximizing whole-field (Strategy 1) and maximizing screened high-efficiency field (Strategy 2). For two heliostat fields, Strategy 2 improved annual efficiency by ∼0.9 % over Strategy 1, regardless of layouts, highlighting the importance of target-oriented optimization strategy. Compared with original Gemasolar-20MW field, four layouts designed by Strategy 2 achieved a relative annual efficiency increase of over 6 %, with campo-only layout realizing the highest efficiency of 60.55 %. Compared with original Haixi-50MW field, Strategy 2 reached over 9 % relative increase, maxing at 60.25 % with the campo-only layout. Importantly, the optimized efficiencies of different designs were nearly identical regardless of layouts, suggesting a potential efficiency upper limit under the same conditions. This method effectively optimizes petal fields, offering valuable insights for heliostat field design and high-dimensional engineering optimization.

Keywords: Annual optical efficiency; Petal layout; Concentrated solar power; Heliostat field; Multi-algorithm filtering; Optimal design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148125002745
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:243:y:2025:i:c:s0960148125002745

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2025.122612

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().