In this paper, a new closed-loop control for the heliostat aiming of solar tower power plants is proposed. It is called Static Optimal Control and is based upon the ant-colony optimization meta-heuristic. The controller can increase the plant’s efficiency, restrict the flux density and compensate for disturbances such as clouds. It is tested on small reference plant with a test case considering a suddenly appearing cloud disturbance. Within the test case, the controller could compensate for a mirror error which caused a drop of the relative power of around 3%. During the cloudy phase, the controller increased the relative power by 1%. The overflux condition which occurred after the cloud suddenly disappeared could be eliminated within 12 control steps. However, this number can be reduced by adjusting the controller parameters.

Topics
Plant efficiency, Solar power plants, Heliostats, Algorithms and data structure, Control theory, Mathematical optimization
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