Wrong incident energy using round heliostat

Hello Paul,

we came across another issue while using round heliostats.

We set up two identical cases by setting the upper and lower PTgen
boundaries to identical values.
Heliostat width and height are also identical in both cases,
the only difference is the checkbox "use round heliostats".

Running the optimizer now places more heliostats if round
heliostats are used as a round heliostat only has factor pi/4 of the
square heliostat's area.

So far everything is correct, the fields reflective area is about
the same.

But after running a calculation and taking a look at the
graph showing the total incident energy for the round
heliostat, the value is too large.

It looks like the wrong area is used to calculate the total incicent energy
for the round heliostats. We assume that the area of the square
heliostat is used...

Can you reproduce this behaviour?

Kind regards,
Joe

Dear Joe,

Thank you for letting us know about this problem with the power tower model. We have confirmed the behavior and will fix it in the next version of SAM, which we are finalizing now and hope to release within the next few weeks.

Best regards,
Paul.