TY  - EJOU
AU  - Meng, Zichang 
AU  - Chen, Na 
AU  - Li, Qi 
AU  - Liu, Qingyi 
AU  - Jiang, Hongfei 

TI  - EB-Guided Optimization of Heliostat Fields with Validated Projection Losses and HFLCAL Sensitivity
T2  - Energy Engineering

PY  - 2026
VL  - 123
IS  - 4
SN  - 1546-0118

AB  - 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.
KW  - Heliostat field; shading and blocking; HFLCAL truncation; eliminate-blocking layout; metaheuristics; solar tower; sensitivity analysis

DO  - 10.32604/ee.2025.072848