Abstract

The optimized layout of a central receiver power plants requires an accurate but fast simulation of the plant operation depending on its design parameters. Ray tracing models are commonly used to calculate the solar flux concentrated by the heliostat field. The computation time for an annual performance simulation is critical for the usage in an optimization procedure. The main influences on run-time are the spatial (number of rays) and temporal (number of time points) discretization. For the annual simulation, usually weather data from clear sky models is used. Using non-symmetric measured weather data (e.g. from a TMY file) the temporal sample points have to be chosen in a different way. In this paper, different temporal integration approaches are presented and discussed for the case of measured weather data.