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Pargmann, M.* ; Ebert, J.* ; Goetz, M.* ; Quinto, D.M.* ; Pitz-Paal, R.* ; Kesselheim, S.*

Automatic heliostat learning for in situ concentrating solar power plant metrology with differentiable ray tracing.

Nat. Commun. 15:12 (2024)

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Concentrating solar power plants are a clean energy source capable of competitive electricity generation even during night time, as well as the production of carbon-neutral fuels, offering a complementary role alongside photovoltaic plants. In these power plants, thousands of mirrors (heliostats) redirect sunlight onto a receiver, potentially generating temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees C. Practically, such efficient temperatures are never attained. Several unknown, yet operationally crucial parameters, e.g., misalignment in sun-tracking and surface deformations can cause dangerous temperature spikes, necessitating high safety margins. For competitive levelized cost of energy and large-scale deployment, in-situ error measurements are an essential, yet unattained factor. To tackle this, we introduce a differentiable ray tracing machine learning approach that can derive the irradiance distribution of heliostats in a data-driven manner from a small number of calibration images already collected in most solar towers. By applying gradient-based optimization and a learning non-uniform rational B-spline heliostat model, our approach is able to determine sub-millimeter imperfections in a real-world setting and predict heliostat-specific irradiance profiles, exceeding the precision of the state-of-the-art and establishing full automatization. The new optimization pipeline enables concurrent training of physical and data-driven models, representing a pioneering effort in unifying both paradigms for concentrating solar power plants and can be a blueprint for other domains. Solar tower power plants' efficiency is hindered due to component defects such as heliostat misalignment and surface deformations. Authors propose machine learning with differentiable ray tracing to identify these errors from calibration images and predict irradiance profiles, enhancing operational efficiency.

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