Heliostat Cluster Control for the Solar Tower Power Plant Based on Leader-Follower Strategy

As one of the most promising power generation technologies using renewable energy sources, and the solar thermal electric power generation may be developed to alleviate the energy crisis. But it still faces the obstacles of excessive cost and low energy efficiency nowadays. To this end, a method of using heliostats cluster control is proposed to solve the main contradiction in solar tower power plants. In this approach, the entire heliostats field will be divided into a few groups, and a leader heliostat with high-precision closed-loop control is arranged in each group while the remaining heliostats as follower heliostats. On this basis, a leader heliostat tracking model is established and a leader-to-follower heliostat conversion mode is designed. Meanwhile, the posture information of adjacent leader heliostats is communicated to guarantee the tracking reliability. According to the simulation results of this paper, this method not only improves the automation level of solar tower power plants at this stage, but also reduces the computing complexity of the heliostats field control algorithm. Moreover, the proposed method improves the precision of the control, and also reduces the control cost, making the closed-loop control of the heliostats field possible.