Minimizing the Computational Effort to Optimize Solar Concentrators with the Open-Source Tools SunPATH and Tonatiuh

Integrals that are of interest in the analysis, design, and optimization of concentrating solar thermal systems (CST), such as the annual optical efficiency of the light collection and concentration (LCC) subsystem, can be accurately computed or estimated in two distinct ways: on the time domain and on the spatial domain. This article explores these two ways, using a case study that is highly representative of the commercial CST systems being deployed worldwide. In the time domain, the computation of these integrals are explored using 1-min, 10-min, and 1-h solar DNI input data and using The Cyprus Institute (CyI)’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) system and an open-source ray tracer, Tonatiuh++, being actively developed at CyI. In the spatial domain, the computation of these integrals is explored using SunPATH, another open-source software tool being actively developed at CyI, in tandem with Tonatiuh++. The comparison between the time and spatial domain approach clearly indicate that the spatial domain approach using SunPATH is dramatically more computationally efficient than the time domain approach. According to the results obtained, at least for the case study analyzed in this article, to compute the annual energy delivered by the LCC subsystem with a relative error less than 0.1%, it is enough to provide SunPATH with 1-h DNI data as input, request from SunPATH the sun position and weights of just 30 points in the celestial sphere, and run Tonatiuh++ to simulate these 30 points using 15 million rays per run. As the test case is highly representative, it is expected that this approach will yield similar results for most CST systems of interest.