Modelling and simulation of a solar tower power plant

In this project a simulation and model for a solar tower power plant are made. The model describes the calculation of the solar position, cosine effects, atmospheric attenuation between heliostat and receiver, heliostat reflectivity and shading and blocking. The model has been done taking into account also a discretization of the surface of the heliostats. This discretization was used to find out how many reflected sample rays from each heliostat intersected the tower’s receiver for calculating the total power arriving there. Inspired by the existing pairwise comparison of all heliostats to calculate shading and blocking, an improved approach for this operation is presented. The improvement in computation time using the new method for calculating shading and blocking is significant, specifically for hours very early in the morning and in the afternoon when the shading and blocking effects are more accentuated.