Greetings.

I've tried my best to explain my situation, but sometimes that's not enough or is just too much to confuse. This is related to Solar Thermal Parabolic Concentrators and designing a solar field with optimum spacing.

Please refer to this animation first: https://imgur.com/a/OVKlqOZ

The animation does not depict the actual model of the parabolic dish but only their aperture area.

I'm setting up a large solar field with parabolic solar concentrators with the thermal receiver attached to them. These dishes can track the sun throughout the day with double axis tracking. First I was trying to figure out the optimum spacing for a solar field with 100s of such dishes. Assuming a 10x10 matrix of such dishes, I tried to find out what can be the North-south and east-west spacing.

To do this, in an excel sheet, I calculated the sun's elevation angle and azimuth angle for all 8760 hours of the year. These angles are exclusive to the location selected for the solar field. Specific hours of operation - i.e. 0800 to 1600 - 8 hours of operation are selected. Found the smallest elevation angle and its corresponding azimuth angle. And arranges the solar field of 10x10 dishes accordingly that none of them casts any shadow on the adjacent dish.

Dish placement and shadow analysis were done in Creo. Where I had to input both angles, and both directional spacing. Used trial and error method to input various spacing values until I got the least distance values with no shadows being cast.

This procedure tells me that how much land I would require to place 100 dishes (a square land with its 2 sides parallel and other 2 normals to the equator). Also If I know how much radiation is falling on these dishes, I can calculate how much energy the dishes will generate.

The complications start after this. The variables in the above process

• Latitude and Longitude - Will determine all the elevation and azimuth angles.

• Operational hours - Will determine the lowest elevation angle and its corresponding azimuth angle.

So with other location and someone planning to run the field for a longer or shorter period of time, I'll have to go again with all trial and error procedure.

Also if I make the decision to allow let's say 20% of the shadow, I have no idea how to go forward with that calculation. If someone wants to initially run the plant for 6 hrs, the spacing required for that will be less. But after installation of those dishes, if they run 2 hrs before and 2 hours after that, they will still get some energy, as the dishes will only be partially shaded. I can calculate how much of the energy will be generated/lost because of shading in a specific hour. but to calculate that for around 3000 different values is extremely time-consuming.

So few things I'd like to ask.

• The procedure that I've been following, is there any better way to do that in any other software?

• How Do I perform a simulation (and in which software) that can tell me hour-wise shadow in % so that I can calculate that even with partial shadows, how much the solar field will generate?