Problem
Solar towers use many mirrors to concentrate sun light on a central, tower-mounted receiver. The receiver then transfers the resulting heat to a fluid (i.e. molten salt or air) that, in turn, exchanges the heat to steam which powers a turbine, generating electricity. The placement of the mirrors may lead to individual mirrors being blocked and shaded; this affects the efficiency (and therefore costs) of the power plant. The model is later used for an optimisation process which finds the most efficient arrangement of mirrors.
Gemasolar plant, owned by Torresol Energy © Torresol Energy Investments, S.A.
A similar problem is given by offshore wind parks, where an optimal placement of wind turbines is wanted, such that the turbines are not placed in the wind shadow of each other.
Preliminary work
To some extent, the above described models are implemented with a C++ code. Also an optimizer (genetic algorithm) was written, which optimizes the positions of the heliostats/offshore wind turbines.
Topics
Within this practical course several problems are offered, each will be solved by a group of two to five students.
Master Lab
- Optical Errors Consider mirror surface errors ad tracking errors.
- Annual Simulation Accelerate the annual simulation with a smart choice of time points in a year.
- Aiming Strategy Find a fast heuristic which dictates each heliostat its optimal aim point on the receiver surface.
- Aiming Strategy Find an optimal path for laying the cables which connect heliostats in a solar tower power plant and which connects turbine in a wind farm.
- Optimization Implement a Multi-Step Optimizer, which allows to couple different optimization strategies. Optimize the positioning of wind turbines in an offshore wind farm. Optimize the existing wind farms Horns Rev, DanTysk, and Sandbank which are all placed in the North Sea. Optimize the existing solar tower power plants aHelio100, PS10, and Ashalim.
Requirements
For all topics basic skills in C++ is needed. Please state in which topic you are interested the most. If you already have a favorite partner, please indicate him/her, such that we could select you both during the registration process.
Contact
This project is a corporation of the Theory of Hybrid Systems (i2) research group headed by Prof. Dr. Erika Ábrahám, and the research group for Continuous Optimization at IGPM. The project will be co-supervised by Pascal Richter. For further questions please contact Pascal Richter.