Preliminary design of heliostat field and performance analysis of solar tower plants with thermal storage and hybridisation

Solar tower technology has gained considerable momentum over the past decade. In a solar tower plant, a single receiver is used and the power collected by the heliostat field is strongly coupled to the tower height and its location with respect to the field. The literature available focuses largely on the component-level details of the heliostat field, ray-tracing mechanisms, receiver heat transfer analyses, etc. However, there is no systematic method to determine the preliminary optimum tower height and solar field together with an estimation of a solar tower plant’s technical performance.