Heliostat field wizard

This wizard helps the user creating a new heliostat field in a fast way. There are three main topics the user must set up to create the field: the coordinates of the heliostats, the heliostat model and the aiming strategy of the solar field. This wiki-page presents a description about how to make it works and the available possibilities. This plugin, with this update and features, is available in Tonatiuh since version 2.2.2.

The user can execute the wizard clicking on: Insert>Component>Heliostat_Field_Component

Figure 1. Execute the wizard.

Once it is opened and after going through the description page, a window will appear with the next sections and options.

Figure 2. Helisotat field wizard window.

The coordinates of the heliostats

The coordinates of the heliostats mean the x, y and z values (following the Tonatiuh coordinate system) of the central point of each heliostat. The user can introduce them with a text file where the rows must contain the coordinates of each heliostat and the columns with the values must be separated with tab. Or either, he can open a table window and introduce them by him-self.

Figure 3. Heliostat coordinates section.

Figure 4. Example of coordinate file.

If the user wants to introduce the coordinates manually, first, he must specify the number of heliostats, then that number of rows will be available and ready to fill in. It is not allowed to leave any cell empty or with not numerical value.

Figure 5. Example of introducing coordinates manually.

The heliostat model

The heliostat model which will be placed in all the points defined in the previous section can be a component created in Tonatiuh, file with extension .tcmp, or a new design. This new design must be composed of a surface and the correspondent optical properties. Here, only two kind of surface are available, "Flat_Rectangle" and "Spherical_rectangle". In the second case, the radius of the surfaces can be fixed or two times the slant range (the slant range is the distance between the centre point of the surface and the aiming point). The material automatically applied with this wizard is the Specular_Standard_Material with a normal distribution for the optical error.

Figure 6. Heliostat model section.

The aiming strategy

The main and more common strategies for the aiming of the heliostats are available with this plugin. It's is possible to aim them at a specific point (x, y, z), at a circumference, this strategy is though to use when the receiver is cylindrical, or at one point per heliostat. In this last case, the aiming points can be introduced manually through a table or with a text file with the same format as it must be in the heliostat coordinates section.

Figure 6. Aiming strategy section.

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