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Summary: The present study focuses on the optimization of solar tower power plant heliostat field by considering different heliostat shapes including rectangular, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, and circular heliostat shapes. The optimization is carried out using an in‐house developed code‐based MATLAB program. The developed in‐house code is validated first on a well‐known PS10 Solar Thermal Power plant having rectangular heliostats shape and the resulting yearly unweighted heliostat field efficiency of about 64.43% could be obtained. The optimized PS10 heliostat field using different heliostat shapes showed that the circular and octagon heliostat shapes provide better efficiency with minimum land area. The yearly efficiency is increased from 69.65% for the rectangular heliostat shape to 70.96% and 71% for the octagon and circular shapes, respectively. In addition, the calculated field area (land area) is reduced for the case of circular and octagon heliostat shapes with a gain of about 11.10% and 10.93% (about 42.0436 × 103 and 41.4036 × 103 m2), respectively, in comparison with the PS10 field area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The present study focuses on the optimization of solar tower power plant heliostat field by considering different heliostat shapes including rectangular, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, and circular heliostat shapes. The optimization is carried out using an in‐house developed code‐based MATLAB program. The developed in‐house code is validated first on a well‐known PS10 Solar Thermal Power plant having rectangular heliostats shape and the resulting yearly unweighted heliostat field efficiency of about 64.43% could be obtained. The optimized PS10 heliostat field using different heliostat shapes showed that the circular and octagon heliostat shapes provide better efficiency with minimum land area. The yearly efficiency is increased from 69.65% for the rectangular heliostat shape to 70.96% and 71% for the octagon and circular shapes, respectively. In addition, the calculated field area (land area) is reduced for the case of circular and octagon heliostat shapes with a gain of about 11.10% and 10.93% (about 42.0436 × 103 and 41.4036 × 103 m2), respectively, in comparison with the PS10 field area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The solar power tower (central receiver power plant) as one type of concentrated solar thermal power systems can be used to generate electricity in a way similar to the thermal power plants and so, numerous large-scale central receiver power plants have been constructed and connected to the bulk power system to transfer their generated power to the power network. The variation in solar radiation leads the generated power of these power plants to change, too. Thus, the integration of these large-scale solar power towers into the power system results in some challenges that must be addressed. To study the effect of solar power towers on the power system, new techniques must be developed to consider the uncertain nature of these plants. For this purpose, in this paper, to investigate the impact of central receiver power plants on the operation studies of the power system, the well-being approach is proposed. To consider the solar power towers in the operation studies of the power system, a multistate model is developed for these plants that both variations in the generated power and failure of composed components are taken into account. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, the well-being models of two reliability test systems including RBTS and IEEE-RTS are determined and the effect of the central receiver power plant on the operation indices such as health state probability, risk, spinning reserve, peak load carrying capability and increase in peak load carrying capability is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]