University of Wisconsin, Madison
PROMETHEUS: Predictive and Optimized Control of Heliostats for Future Solar Fields
Topic: Field deploymentPrincipal Investigator: Michael Wagner mjwagner2@wisc.edu
The PROMETHEUS project aims at developing an innovative tool to improve real-time heliostatcontrol and aiming in the solar field. The tool will optimize the aiming strategies accounting for flux intensity impact on receiver lifetime, the actual status of the heliostats (soiling distribution, broken mirrors and/or drivers), and required driver power consumption during transient operation. Nowcasting of the solar radiation and its spatial distribution in the short term (5 to 15 minutes) is incorporated into the solution approach