Case Study: NEM Energy achieves improved heliostat performance and reduced costs with ANSYS simulation

NEM Energy - Customer Case Study

NEM Energy b.v. needed to increase the stiffness and accuracy of its heliostats—mirror arrays that focus sunlight onto a power‑tower receiver—because just a 1° rotation error at 380 m produces a 6.6 m tracking miss. To speed design iterations and avoid slow, costly prototyping, NEM Energy turned to ANSYS, using ANSYS Mechanical to simulate structural behavior and deformation of its heliostat designs.

ANSYS modeled the 16‑facet heliostat with shell elements, automatically created more than 1,000 contacts in ANSYS Workbench, ran plastic‑deformation analyses and used APDL scripts to batch‑evaluate angles and wind loads; results were exported to a ray‑tracing routine to quantify light delivery and potential electricity yield. By using ANSYS, NEM Energy reduced simulation time, confirmed permanent deformations were small enough to rely on linear predictions, optimized mirror stiffness, and accelerated performance improvements and cost reductions while enabling calculation of power output per heliostat.

NEM Energy

Ingmar van Dijk

Solar Team