Open Access

ARTICLE

EB-Guided Optimization of Heliostat Fields with Validated Projection Losses and HFLCAL Sensitivity

Zichang Meng, Na Chen, Qi Li, Qingyi Liu, Hongfei Jiang^*

School of Information and Communication, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin, 541004, China

* Corresponding Author: Hongfei Jiang. Email:

Energy Engineering 2026, 123(4), 7 https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2025.072848

Received 04 September 2025; Accepted 19 December 2025; Issue published 27 March 2026

Abstract

Heliostat field design for tower solar thermal plants must jointly address solar geometry, optical losses, and layout optimization under engineering constraints. We develop an end-to-end workflow that (i) adopts a consistent East–North–Up (ENU) convention for all plant- and sun-related vectors; (ii) integrates cosine efficiency, projection-based shading and blocking (SB), atmospheric transmittance, and an HFLCAL (heliostat field local calculation) truncation model into a single optical chain; and (iii) couples an Eliminate-Blocking (EB) layout prior with an improved “Cheetah” metaheuristic to search ring topology, mirror sizes, and heights while enforcing spacing, kinematics, and rated-power requirements. Projection-based SB is calibrated against Monte-Carlo ray tracing at representative sun positions, and the HFLCAL truncation model is used to quantify sensitivities to sunshape and error-budget parameters. In a three-phase study (fixed-size baseline, uniform sizing, heterogeneous sizing), the EB-guided optimizer improves annual per-area output relative to a radial baseline and reliably attains a 60 MW target. Under equal evaluation budgets, the proposed optimizer converges faster and with lower variance than GA- and PSO-based baselines, while respecting panel-level peak-flux limits through a smooth penalization of flux violations. The resulting layouts exhibit outward-increasing azimuthal spacing and ring-wise size sharing that are consistent with recent heliostat-field deployment experience. The framework is modular, auditable, and readily adaptable to alternative receivers, sites, and cost-aware objectives.

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Keywords

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