PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION OF SOLAR CENTRAL RECEIVER SYSTEMS FROM A MONTE CARLO DIRECT MODEL

Abstract : Considering the investment needed to build a solar concentrating facility, the performance of such an installation has to be maximized. This is the reason why the preliminary design step is one of the most important stage of the project process. This paper presents an optimization approach coupling a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm with a Monte Carlo algorithm applied to the design of Central Receiver Solar systems. After the validation of the direct model from experimental data, several PSO algorithms are tested to pick out efficient parameters.