Background:
Solar Thermal power plants are generating electricity from the energy of the sun. They use a field of a few thousand mirrors to reflect the sun rays onto a receiver located at the top of a tower. In the receiver a fluid is being heated by the concentrated sunlight and then water vapor is generated and sent into a regular turbine. These power plants have been studied extensively in the 70’s and 80’s. There is a strong renewed interest in the technology, and for the past year a number of new projects have been started that need updated software tools for their design and operation.
Project:
The proposed project is a part of the overall development of a suite of software that can support the solar plant designers as well as the plant operators. Their needs include the capability to compute the flux reflected by one/set/all mirrors in the field toward the receiver located at the top of the tower. These computations need to take into account multiple parameters such as the time of the day, location of the mirror and geometry of the receiver. This semester’s project will focus on the development of a Graphical User Interface to define the hundreds of parameters that need to be setup by the Solar Plant designers as well as the integration of the GUI within the suite of tools already developed using XML technology. The software will be designed using an object oriented method, UML, and can be written either in Java or in C++ (or maybe C#). This is a follow-up of capstone projects done over the past 3 semesters.