First results to evaluate losses and gains in solar radiation collected by solar tower plants

Abstract

Accurate computation of Solar Tower Plants (STPs) accounting for the atmospheric scattering gain and loss is nowadays possible with new technologies (computation performance growth). Radiative Transfer (RT) codes can be improved to perform directly and complete optical simulation of incident solar radiation in STPs. In this work, the RT SMART-G code, enabling fast computation thanks to GPU technology, have been improved to enables interactions between solar radiation and objects. Considering all the possible optical paths, a classification of the solar beams received by STPs is presented. The preliminary results obtained with a simplified STP, show that the gains due to atmospheric contribution at STPs receiver with an average horizontal heliostat-receiver distance from 200 to 900 meters is between 0.7% to more than 5%, depending on the aerosol optical thickness. The studied system is currently a simplified STP of maximum eight heliostats, but it is a promising way for other studies with more realistic STP and different illumination conditions.