Ray Tracing of Irradiance Distributions on Triangular Surface Meshes in Solar Tower Systems

Abstract

This thesis presents a method to approximate the irradiance distribution of complexly shaped receivers in solar tower systems by modeling surface interactions of light based on physical principles. This method makes use of sampling radiant flux through the use of ray tracing with the help of bidirectional scattering distribution functions. It differs from previous methods in so far as the models both for the receiver and the surface interactions are kept very flexible to handle complex scenarios. Additionally, this thesis presents results for the comparison to the previous method and for a wide range of test cases to evaluate the approach put forward. The results indicate that although the method introduced in this thesis performs worse than the previous method, it is more flexible and allows for the simulation of complexly shaped receivers, which was not possible before.