A new heliostat field optimal design strategy for deformable petal hybrid layout of concentrated solar power via multi-algorithm filtering

A new optimization method was proposed to design high-performance deformable petal heliostat fields for concentrated solar power. The petal field was divided into individual sectors, each separately designed to balance pattern orderliness and flexibility. A suitable high-dimensional optimization algorithm was identified from 129 different algorithms using multi-algorithm filtering. To examine the proposed method, four petal field layouts (campo-only, spiral-only, and their north-south combinations) were tested on Gemasolar-20MW and Haixi-50MW fields. Two annual optical efficiency optimization strategies were employed: maximizing whole-field (Strategy 1) and maximizing screened high-efficiency field (Strategy 2). For two heliostat fields, Strategy 2 improved annual efficiency by ∼0.9 % over Strategy 1, regardless of layouts, highlighting the importance of target-oriented optimization strategy. Compared with original Gemasolar-20MW field, four layouts designed by Strategy 2 achieved a relative annual efficiency increase of over 6 %, with campo-only layout realizing the highest efficiency of 60.55 %. Compared with original Haixi-50MW field, Strategy 2 reached over 9 % relative increase, maxing at 60.25 % with the campo-only layout. Importantly, the optimized efficiencies of different designs were nearly identical regardless of layouts, suggesting a potential efficiency upper limit under the same conditions. This method effectively optimizes petal fields, offering valuable insights for heliostat field design and high-dimensional engineering optimization.