SolTrace Plugin by NREL/Alliance for Sustainable Energy
The SolTrace Plugin brings NREL’s proven SolTrace ray-tracing engine to plugin-enabled workflows, allowing engineers and researchers to model, analyze, and optimize the optical performance of concentrating solar power (CSP) systems. Built on Monte Carlo ray tracing, it simulates how sunlight interacts with reflective and refractive components to predict flux distributions, intercept factors, spillage, and overall optical efficiency.
Key capabilities:
- Models a wide range of CSP configurations, including heliostat fields, power towers, parabolic troughs, dishes, and linear Fresnel systems.
- Accounts for sunshape, surface slope and specularity errors, tracking accuracy, shading, and blocking effects.
- Generates detailed receiver flux maps and performance metrics to support design trade-offs and validation.
- Supports geometry definition and import, material and coating properties, and configurable optical settings.
- Enables scripted or automated studies for sensitivity analysis, optimization, and batch processing.
- Produces outputs suitable for downstream thermal and system-level simulations.
Typical use cases:
- Designing and optimizing heliostat layouts, receiver geometries, and trough or dish concentrators.
- Evaluating optical losses, aiming strategies, and mirror quality impacts.
- Performing comparative studies and validating CSP system designs in research and development settings.
- Integrating high-fidelity optical results into broader techno-economic workflows.
Developed by NREL/Alliance for Sustainable Energy, the SolTrace Plugin provides a robust, research-grade foundation for accurate CSP optical modeling in modern analysis environments.
SolTrace Plugin is developed by NREL/Alliance for Sustainable Energy. The most popular versions of this product among our users are: 0.5 and 0.6.
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