Numerical identification of mirror shapes with the backward-gazing method using an actual solar profile

Concentrated solar tower uses a huge number of heliostats and efforts are devoted to characterize the heliostats on-site at commissioning and during operation. The patented backward-gazing method with multiple cameras addresses the requirement of a fast and on-site optical characterization technique. This work concerns the study of the influence of the actual sun’s radiative intensity profile, recorded by a camera, on the accuracy of the mirror deformations identified by the post-treatment algorithms. An optimization algorithm was implemented and showed a satisfactory accuracy with maximum discrepancy of 7.3 % on the reconstructed facet slopes. The results show that the optimization method is the less sensitive to the noise and non-axisymmetricity of the sun’s intensity profile.