Strategies in tower solar power plant optimization

TL;DR

This paper explores optimization strategies for tower solar power plants by applying various algorithms to minimize a multi-variable objective function, identifying key design variables and comparing algorithm performance.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive optimization framework for solar tower plant design, including a method to evaluate the impact of each design variable on performance.

Findings

All algorithms converged to the same optimal design.

Performance of algorithms varies with case complexity.

Key variables influencing plant efficiency identified.

Abstract

A method for optimizing a central receiver solar thermal electric power plant is studied. We parametrize the plant design as a function of eleven design variables and reduce the problem of finding optimal designs to the numerical problem of finding the minimum of a function of several variables. This minimization problem is attacked with different algorithms both local and global in nature. We find that all algorithms find the same minimum of the objective function. The performance of each of the algorithms and the resulting designs are studied for two typical cases. We describe a method to evaluate the impact of design variables in the plant performance. This method will tell us what variables are key to the optimal plant design and which ones are less important. This information can be used to further improve the plant design and to accelerate the optimization procedure.