Shading Calculations for the Big Dish

The Australian National University has re-engineered its Big Dish design for commercialisation and mass production [1], building the 'SG4' 500m Big Dish solar paraboloidal concentrator for solar-thermal to electric energy conversion using direct-steam generation. The SG4 Dish implements two-axis tracking and may be incorporated into a dish-array for large-scale power production. A program has been created for modelling the annual shading fraction in an array of two-axis tracking collectors. Annual shading on the SG4 dish included into an array of a specific shape with a pre-defined energy transport network was simulated for a site location of Canberra, Australia. Annual shading fraction was calculated in order to optimise dish spacing for reduction of the energy transport network pipe length. Results shows that dish separations can be altered to reduce pipe length by 11.6% for the proposed array without introducing further losses to the system.