• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.41-51
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• 2012

Heliostat field is the most important subsystem in the tower type solar thermal power plant since its optical performance affects the total system efficiency most significantly while the construction cost of it is the major part of total construction cost in such a power plant. Thus a well designed heliostat field to maximize the optical efficiency as well as to minimize the land usage is very important. This work presents methodology, procedures and result of heliostat filed design for 200kW solar thermal power plant built recently in Daegu, Korea. A $2{\times}2(m)$ rectangular shaped receiver located at 43(m) high and tilted $28^{\circ}$ toward heliostat field, 450 of heliostats of which the reflective surface is formed by 4 of $1{\times}1(m)$ flat plate mirror facet, and the land area having about $140{\times}120(m)$ size are used to form the heliostat field. A procedure to deploy 450 heliostats in radial staggered nonblocking formation is developed. Also the procedures to compute the cosine effect, intercept ratio, blocking and shading ratio in the field are developed. Finally the heliostat filed is designed by finding the optimal radial distance and azimuthal spacing in radial staggered nonblocking formation such that the designed heliostat field optical efficiency could be maximized. The designed heliostat field has 77% of annual average optical efficiency, which is obtained by annually averaging the optical efficiencies computed between the time of where sun elevation angle becomes $10^{\circ}$ after sunrise and the time of where sun elevation angle becomes $10^{\circ}$ before sunset in each day.