T. Ashley, E. Carrizosa, E. Fernández-Cara
Soiling of heliostat surfaces due to local climate has a direct impact on their optical efficiency and therefore a direct impact on the productivity of the Solar Power Tower (SPT) plant. Cleaning techniques applied are dependent on plant construction and current schedules are normally developed considering heliostat layout patterns, providing sub-optimal results and have not been seriously investigated in literature. In this paper, an optimised cleaning schedule is developed in order to maximise optical efficiency of heliostats.
First, an algorithm finds a cleaning schedule by solving an integer programme, which is then used as a starting solution in an exchange heuristic. Since the optimisation problems are of large size, a p-median type heuristic is first performed to reduce the problem dimensionality by clustering heliostats into groups to be cleaned in the same period.
Palabras clave / Keywords: solar energy, routing problems, scheduling, cluster analysis
Programado
Sesión GT04-2: Localización (GELOCA-2). Organizador: Antonio Manuel Rodríguez Chía
29 de mayo de 2018 17:00
Sala 3
