Leveraging neural networks to optimize heliostat field aiming strategies in Concentrating Solar Power Tower plants

Abstract

Concentrating Solar Power Tower (CSPT) plants rely on heliostat fields to focus sunlight onto a central receiver. Although simple aiming strategies, such as directing all heliostats to the receiver’s equator, can maximize energy collection, they often result in uneven flux distributions that cause hotspots, thermal stresses, and reduced receiver lifetimes. This paper presents a novel, data-driven approach that combines constraint learning, neural network-based surrogates, and mathematical optimization to address these challenges. The methodology learns complex heliostat-to-receiver flux interactions from simulation data and embeds the resulting surrogate model in a tractable optimization framework. By maximizing a tailored quality score that balances energy collection with flux uniformity, the approach produces smoothly distributed flux profiles and mitigates excessive thermal peaks. An iterative refinement process, guided by a trust region strategy and progressive data sampling, ensures continual improvement of the surrogate model by exploring new solution spaces at each iteration. Results from a real CSPT case study show that the proposed approach outperforms conventional heuristic methods, delivering flatter flux distributions with nearly a 10% reduction in peak values and safer thermal conditions (reflected by up to a 50% decrease in deviations from safe concentration distributions), without significantly compromising overall energy capture.