Solar field layout constraints

Dear Paul,

As I saw one answer from you in Forum, you said the tower height can be set as range in 'Solar field layout constraints'. But I'm not quite understand that. The max distance and min distance from tower depends on tower height and heliostats distance to tower height ratio. So I don't think this provides a constraint on the variation range of tower height. When optimizing the heliostat field, the tower height will change automatically from the initial point. Could you please explain this? Thank you so much. 

Another problem is: when generating or optimizing heliostat layout, the monthly weather data is not symmetric leads to the layout is not symmetric ? Is this explanation correct? 

Thank you so much.

Best regards,
Francesca

Hi Francesca,

You are correct that SAM's solar field layout constraints allow you to limit the minimum and maximum "heliostat distance to tower height ratio," which is not a constraint on the tower height only.

The distribution of heliostats does depend on the solar resource over the year.

If you want more control over the optimization, including defining a land boundary or shape for the heliostat field, you might consider using SolarPILOT directly, which gives you more control than the implementation in SAM:

www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpilot.html

A video introducing SolarPILOT is listed on the CSP Videos page:

sam.nrel.gov/concentrating-solar-power/csp-videos.html

Best regards,
Paul.