Software tools for optical design of solar plants

Considering the optical point of view, software procedures are studied to facilitate the simulation of heliostats fields, which are typically employed in Concentrating Solar Power plants. The analysis of heliostats field behavior is simplified exploiting the possibility of interfacing optical design codes with programming systems. Integrated software tools can guide the system analysis from the optical point of view, manage the large data amount and extract the critical parameters. Some software tools are addressed to solve specific problems and to evidence particularly crucial features. © 2014 AEIT.