Solar Thermal Plant Design and Operational Suite of Tools

Final Report

Version <1.0>

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Kwok-Bun Yue

Mentor

Dr. Michel Izygon

Team Members

Lakshmi Javvadi Yogitha

Sukumar Bollineni

Deepa Borra

Sasya Kodali

Acknowledgement:

We are thankful to our instructor Dr. Kwok Bun, Yue and mentor Dr. Michel,Izygon for providing us their valuable guidance and encouragement in bringing out this project successfully.

We would like to thank the previous capstone (Team#5 Spring-07) for providing required information.

We are thankful to Ms. Abeysekera, Krishani and Mr. Henning, Seljenes for providing us with the resources required for our project.

We would also like to thank all the people who helped us in this project and whom we might not have mentioned here.

Table of Contents

1. Abstract………………………………………………………………………....5

2. Introduction……………………………………………………………………..5

3. Functional Requirements:………………………………………………………6

4. Glosorry:………………………………………………………………………..7

5. Required Technologies:………………………………………………………...7

6.Design and Implementation of the Solution…………………………………….9

6.1 Flow Chart Diagram

6.2 System Architecture Diagram

6.3 Use Case Diagram

7. Implementation Issues………………………………………………………...12

8. Solution of the problem ………………………………………………………12

9. Project Management and Team Information………………………………….13

9.1 Time line of our project

9.2 Project Management and Team Information

9.3 Lessons learnt

10. Future Enhancements……………………………………………………….15

11. Screen shots…………………………………………………………………15

12. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………17

13. Appendix B (Downloaded Technologies)……………………………………17

1. Abstract:

Our Project is an extension of the work done by the previous batch in last semester. Their project application provides a web based application to calculate the optimal Azimuth & Altitude of a heliostat by finding the normal vector to produce maximum reflected energy based on longitude and latitude of the plant location, time of day, position of heliostats and receiver.

Our aim is to improve the user interface of the previous project and also to add more add functionalities in some modules. A field of heliostats suffers losses caused by shading and blocking by neighboring heliostats. Our task is to find the shading and blocking of the mirrors for which we are going to consider placement of grids of mirrors around the tower. One more important task of our project is to take a particular cell from the grid and find the location of the mirrors in radial stagger way. We also consider the values of the cell in the grid to calculate the heliostat co-ordinates. Once we get the co-ordinates in heliostat co-ordinate system we have to change those to absolute co-ordinate systems.

2. Introduction:

Solar Thermal power plants are generating electricity from the energy of the sun. They generate heat by using lenses and reflectors to concentrate the sun's energy.This heat will be stored in the tower and generate power whenever it is needed. They use a field of thousands of movable mirrors called heliostats to reflect the sun rays onto a receiver located at the top of a tower. In the receiver a liquid is being heated by the reflected sunlight and then steam will be generated and sent into a regular turbine which is then converted into electricity.

The purpose of this project is to develop a set of software tools that will help the plant designers as well as operators to compute the optimal values for design factors of solar thermal power plants. The main focus of the project is to compute the optimal values of angles and positions of mirrors so that maximum energy is reflected towards the receiver. A field of heliostats suffers losses caused by shading and blocking by neighboring heliostats. Our task is to find the shading and blocking of the mirrors. Once we find shading & blocking occurred by the mirror then we have to implement it for the other neighboringmirrors and also we have to find the position of the mirrors by changing azimuth and elevation.

3.Functional Requirements:

  1. Populating the longitude and latitude of the selected location and also dynamically storing the longitude and latitude of new location which is entered by the user.
  2. To find the shading and blocking of the mirrors. We have to consider particular cell from the grid to calculate the co-ordinates .Previously it has been assumed that there is only one mirror per cell in a grid.
  3. Once we find the co-ordinates of one mirror we need to place eight mirrors around that mirror within a cell and compute the shading and blocking of the center mirror by changing the distance between the center mirror and the neighboring mirrors. Once we locate the mirror we need to calculate the shading occurred by these mirrors.

4. Glossary:

Term / Definition
Heliostat / Movable mirrors that are used in the solar energy plants.
Grid / Pattern of mirrors represented in rows and columns
Azimuth / Azimuth is the angle, usually measured in degrees, between a reference plane and a point.
Altitude / The angular distance of a object above the horizon
Flux / The rate of flow of fluid, particles, or energy through a given surface.
Shading / Shading occurs at low sun angles when a heliostat casts its shadow on a heliostat located behind it.
Blocking / Blocking occurs when a heliostat in front of another heliostat blocks the reflected flux on its way to the receiver.
Angle of Elevation / It is the elevation angle of the sun, i.e. the angle between the direction of the sun and the horizon.

User Requirements: It mainly focuses on the performance and the satisfaction of the user with the system.In theapplication, there is a need to find the losses due to shading and blocking. The application should be able to take an input file as a text file and write computed values for this file into another text file.

5. Required Technologies:

We have used the following technologies to implement the project

  • Java 1.6
  • Java servlets
  • Java Server Pages
  • XML.
  • Net beans
  • Java 3D

Net beans 5.5.1: Net beans are a Java-based development environment (IDE) and platform developed by Sun. It includes source code editor, User Interface functions, Graphical User Interface editor and also supports distributed applications like CORBA, RMI, etc. and Web applications JSP, Servlets, JavaBeans etc.

Java: Java is a simple, robust, secure, object-oriented, distributed, multithreaded, interpreted, architecture neutral, portable, and dynamic. Java has gained enormous popularity since it first appeared. Its rapid ascension and wide acceptance can be traced to its design and programming features, particularly in its promise that you can write a program once, and run it anywhere.

Java 3D:

Java 3Dis an interface that encapsulates the graphics programming using a real, object oriented concept. It is a scene graph-based 3D application programming interface (API) for the Java platform. It runs on top of either Direct3D or OpenGL.

6. Design and implementation of the solution:

6.1 Flow chart Diagram:

Select the heliostat

from the grid

if

Intersection No

Yes

Yes

No

Vary Yes

ΔR & ΔAz

No

6.2 System Architecture:

6.3 Use case diagram:

7. Implementation Issues:

  • For some reasons with the current environment setup we couldn’t run any applets on our web browser, although we were able to view our applets in the net beans viewer.
  • We are not able to start the server with the j3d jars as they are kind of linked with some .dll files or something. We were getting this exception in the server logs.
  • No real time testing can be done – We worked on data provided in the text file. Never had a chance to see the actual field or use any other related tools.

8. Solution of the problem

Our task is to find the shading and blocking of the mirrors. Once we find shading & blocking occurred by the mirror then we have to implement it for the other neighboringmirrors and also we have to find the position of the mirrors by varying the distances between them.

Tasks we have completed:

  1. Improved the User interface of the previous capstone project.
  2. Populating the longitude and latitude of the selected location and also dynamically storing the longitude and latitude of new location which is entered by the user.
  3. Finding the equation of the plane of target mirror.
  4. Finding the co-ordinates of the target mirror on the absolute coordinate system.
  5. Finding the co-ordinates of the source mirror on the absolute coordinate system.
  6. Finding the Java3D functions that help to calculate shading and blocking.

Tasks to be done:

  1. Compute the projections of the source mirror corners with respect to sun vector on to the target mirror plane.
  2. Compute the intersection area of the target mirror and the projected plane

9. Project Management:

9.1 Time Line of Our Project:

9.2 Team Information:

Lakshmi Yogitha Javvadi (Team Leader)– Co-ordinates team meetings and assigns asks. Involved in Research & Design, Website maintenance, Debugging and Documentation.

Sasya Kodali – Involved in Research & Design, debugging, website maintenance & Documentation

Deepa Borra – Involved in Research & Design, Website maintenance,Testing & Debugging and Documentation.

Sukumar Bollineni–Involved inResearch, Developing & Programming, Website maintenance, Testing and Documentation

9.3 Lessons Learnt:

  • Importance of Research

As we are new tosolar energy thermal plants, getting to know them required a lot of research.We had done lot of research on mathematics to compute shading and blocking.We understood how important it is to thoroughly research the topics on which we have no definitive idea before trying to implement them.

  • Time Management

Another important lesson we have learnt is the importance of time management. Meeting the various deadlines was challenging and gave us a valuable experience to complete the work on time.

  • Team Work

We also understood the importance of team work. Working together as a team with different people is very challenging and reaching a consensus might be tough in certain situations.

  • Gained valuable experience

We have gained good knowledge and experience working on this project. We got thorough knowledge about the technologies likeJSP, Servlets and Javabeans by working in this project.Also we have learnt a new technology JAVA 3D.

10.Future Enhancements

  • We have assumed the heliostats to be in arectangular shape. The future work will be implementing for different geometrical shapes.
  • The future work includes optimizing the flux, minimizing the shading & blocking and also considering the mirrors in a circular manner.

11. Screen shots

12. Conclusion:

We have developed professional web application for solar thermal plant designers. We have improved the UI of the previous capstone. Our current work enables to compute the absolute coordinates of the mirror and we are going to find the shading and blocking.

13. Appendix:

Downloaded Technologies:

  • Java 1.6 jdk from
  • Net Beans IDE 5.5 from
  • Java 3D from

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