A Novel Optical Efficiency Model for Heliostat Fields Based on 2D Boolean Operations

Abstract The optimal design of the heliostat field is one of the fundamental issues in concentrated solar power generation. Due to the complexity of computing the shading and blocking, the accurate computation of optical efficiency of the heliostat field requires high computational resources. In this work, an optical efficiency model based on 2D Boolean operations was proposed, in which the heliostat, shading, and blocking objects were converted into planar polygons defined by boundaries and the planar polygons were reconstructed for Boolean operations (e.g., intersection, union, and difference). By comparing with the ray tracing method based on heliostat discretization and boundary mesh, it is shown that for the same accuracy requirement, the proposed method can greatly reduce the computation time. The method may serve as a powerful tool for the optimization design of complex heliostat fields.