Mars 2023 - Tuning the geometric design of energetic systems when they involve Radiative Transfer
One of our energy analysis tools, designed for engineers facing highly complex geometries, was published on 17 February 2023 in Solar Energy (Monte-Carlo estimation of geometric sensitivities in Solar Power Tower systems of flat mirrors). All the associated computation libraries are available under a free license and we organize training sessions for engineers that wish to make use of such analysis and adapt our Monte Carlo development framework to their specific needs.
The picture illustrates the work of Zili He who has successfully quantified how the solar power collected by Sierra SunTower (a Concentrated Solar Plant in Lancaster, California) is sensitive to each geometrical parameter of each of 6090 heliostats within the field. He achieved this using the geometric sensitivity model of Paule Lapeyre (Monte-Carlo and sensitivity transport models for domain deformation). The main observation of Paule Lapeyre is that sensitivities propagate in space the exact same way radiation does. The same Monte Carlo tools as those commonly used to compute the collected solar power can therefore be also used to quantify sensitivities. But then all the subtlety is in the boundary conditions and in the way they are computationally handled. Zili He revisited this proposition both physically and computationally. A vectorial formalism is now available that can be combined with advanced computer graphics to perform the simultaneous computation of the huge number of all the sensitivities displayed in the present figure (each dot in each plot is one heliostat sensitivity).
