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4.2 PRINCIPLES FOR CONCENTRATION FIELD LAYOUT 241

such as HELIOS, ASPOC, HFLCAL, RCELL, DELSOL, MIRVAL,
and Solergy. [20] Early solar-concentrating field design software
focused on the modeling and analysis of already-arranged heliostat
fields and specified receiver locations, while user interfaces featured
comparatively low degrees of visualization, inconvenient usage,
and great difficulty upgrading the software. These past deficiencies
have led to the successful development of new heliostat field design
software in recent years. In 2001, PSA of the CIEMATorganization in
Spain developed the WinDELSOL 1.0 software, which runs in a
Windows environment on the basis of DELSOL3 with an improved
degree of visualization in the software interface. Within the same
year, Siala et al. from the Center For Solar Energy Studies, Libya,
proposed the concept of no-blocking radial staggered layout of the
heliostat field and wrote the heliostat field design software MUEEN
to analyze heliostat field performance; however, it was not equipped
with a heliostat field optimization function. In 2003, the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory in the United States developed
SolTrace software, which applied Monte Carlo ray tracing to
calculate interception efficiency and energy flux density; it
simulated and compared complex optical systems and analyze their
optical performance; however, it also was not equipped with a
heliostat field optimization design function. In 2005, SENER Corp.
of Mexico developed the powerful SENSOL software, which
performed simulation, analysis, and optimization design for various
types of solar-concentrating power generation systems. During the
period 2005e2011, with support from the national “11th Five-year
Plan” 863 Program, the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine
Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the
Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
jointly developed the heliostat field design software HFLD
(Heliostat Field Layout Design). The Institute of Electrical
Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences designed the 10,000 m 2
heliostat field of the Beijing Badaling solar tower power plant using
this software. The main feature of HFLD was analysis of the solar
field performance for known mirror coordinates and receiver
locations. It automatically arranged the heliostat field according to
parameters set by the user and conducted performance analysis and
optimization design of the heliostat field. This version was not
equipped with a joint optimization function with the receiver.
Separately, the Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy
of Sciences also developed a code for a set of solar tower optics in
2013, named heliostats optical code (HOC), that can both optimize
the layout of the heliostat field and analyze a given heliostat field’s
optical performance.