Hi Javier,
1. No, SolarPILOT does not calculate tower shadows on the heliostat. You could could account for shadows by disabling heliostats that fall within the tower’s shadow either in the user interface or via scripting.
2. No, SolarPILOT only supports rectangular heliostats. Some initial work on round heliostats was started, but that work is not complete.
3. SolarPILOT does not support heliostats with double tilt drives.
4. As for the shadowing and blocking loss calculations, the optical zones are used only for intercept efficiency calculations done as part of the field layout calculations, and blocking, shading, and all other losses consider all possible neighboring heliostats. This method is used to assign a value of intercept efficiency to heliostats in a local region. Any potential inaccuracy by approximating the intercept factor of a local group of heliostats with a single value would only show up in the selection of heliostats included in the final layout; it would not affect the performance characterization of that field once layout is complete. In other words, intercept efficiency is evaluated for every heliostat separately when conducting performance calculations for a given layout.
5. For aiming strategy, layout calculations are done assuming all heliostats aim at the center of the receiver (“simple aim points”). The optical groups are determined once and are not updated based on sun position during layout calculations. Note that the use of the optical zone method can be disabled with the “Enable optical zone layout method” checkbox on the Layout Setup page of the SolarPILOT software interface. If you’d like to compare the layout with and without this method, it can easily be done by toggling this checkbox and regenerating the layout.
Best regards,
Paul.
