Publications

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Dish concentrators can produce highly concentrated flux for the operation of an engine, a chemical process, or other energy converter. The high concentration allows a small aperture to control thermal losses, and permits high temperature processes at the focal point. A variety of optical errors can influence the flux pattern both at the aperture and at the absorber surface. Impacts of these errors can be lost energy (intercept losses), aperture compromise (increased size to accommodate flux), high peak fluxes (leading to part failure or life reduction), and improperly positioned flux also leading to component failure. Optical errors can include small scale facet errors ("waviness"), facet shape errors, alignment (facet pointing) errors, structural deflections, and tracking errors. The errors may be random in nature, or may be systematic. The various sources of errors are often combined in a "root-mean-squared" process to present a single number as an "error budget". However, this approach ignores the fact that various errors can influence the performance in different ways, and can mislead the designer, leading to component damage in a system or poor system performance. In this paper, we model a hypothetical radial gore dish system using Sandia's CIRCE2 optical code. We evaluate the peak flux and incident power through the aperture and onto various parts of the receiver cavity. We explore the impact of different error sources on the character of the flux pattern, and demonstrate the limitations of lumping all of the errors into a single error budget. © 2010 by ASME.

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The proper alignment of facets on a dish engine concentrated solar power system is critical to the performance of the system. These systems are generally highly concentrating to produce high temperatures for maximum thermal efficiency so there is little tolerance for poor optical alignment. Improper alignment can lead to poor performance and shortened life through excessively high flux on the receiver surfaces, imbalanced power on multicylinder engines, and intercept losses at the aperture. Alignment approaches used in the past are time consuming field operations, typically taking 4-6 h per dish with 40-80 facets on the dish. Production systems of faceted dishes will need rapid, accurate alignment implemented in a fraction of an hour. In this paper, we present an extension to our Sandia Optical Fringe Analysis Slope Technique mirror characterization system that will automatically acquire data, implement an alignment strategy, and provide real-time mirror angle corrections to actuators or labor beneath the dish. The Alignment Implementation for Manufacturing using Fringe Analysis Slope Technique (AIMFAST) has been implemented and tested at the prototype level. In this paper we present the approach used in AIMFAST to rapidly characterize the dish system and provide near-real-time adjustment updates for each facet. The implemented approach can provide adjustment updates every 5 s, suitable for manual or automated adjustment of facets on a dish assembly line.

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