Welcome to ARTIST

ARTIST stands for AI-Enhanced Differentiable Ray Tracer for Irradiation Prediction in Solar Tower Digital Twins. The ARTIST package provides an implementation of a fully differentiable ray tracer using the PyTorch machine-learning framework in Python. Leveraging automatic differentiation and GPU computation, ARTIST enables gradient-based optimization within a differentiable solar tower power plant model using smooth parametric descriptions of heliostats. While the underlying framework is designed to support the optimization of arbitrary plant components, including towers and receivers, the current implementation focuses on data-driven heliostat surface reconstruction and alignment.

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The concentrating solar power (CSP) plant in Jülich, Germany. Credit: DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

☀️ Our key contributions include:

  • Efficient heliostat calibration: ARTIST combines a differentiable geometric model of heliostat kinematics with parallelized computation to enable efficient heliostat reconstruction from receiver flux measurements. This results in a flexible and robust calibration approach.

  • Accurate surface reconstruction and flux density prediction: Leveraging learning Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS), ARTIST reconstructs heliostat surfaces accurately using calibration images commonly available in solar thermal power plants. Thus, we can achieve sub-millimeter accuracy in mirror reconstruction from focal spot images, contributing to improved operational safety and efficiency. The reconstructed surfaces can be used for predicting unique heliostat flux densities with state-of-the-art accuracy. Check out this paper for more details:

    M. Pargmann, J. Ebert, M. Götz et al. Automatic heliostat learning for in situ concentrating solar power plant metrology with differentiable ray tracing. Nat Commun 15, 6997 (2024).

  • Immediate deployment: ARTIST can be deployed from the beginning of a solar thermal power plant’s operation, enabling in situ calibration and subsequent improvements in energy efficiency and cost reduction.

  • Optimized flux density: ARTIST enables flux density optimization across an entire heliostat field by adjusting heliostat motor positions to obtain an optimal flux distribution on the receiver.

Quick Install

To install the latest stable release from PyPI, run the following in your terminal:

$ pip install artist-csp

You can check whether your installation was successful by importing ARTIST in Python:

import artist

You can find more detailed installation instructions in Installation.

Check out How To Use ARTIST to find out more about to how to use ARTIST.

Contents

Indices and Tables