doi:10.1364/OE.27.00A257engCarretero, E.Preciado, J.Salinas, I.Ayora, I.Heras, C.Evaluation and measurement of heliostat misalignment in solar power plant using vector modelART-2019-111452Heliostat alignment evaluation is among the main issues in solar tower concentration plant operation and maintenance. This paper describes a novel method used to evaluate heliostat misalignment and its experimental verification. This method provides a different way of visualizing beam centroid pointing errors by generating the complete deviation curve for each axis. This, for example, would be useful for verifying a heliostat’s correct alignment by using a measurement performed out of the receiver target, using these traces to calculate its reflection’s expected location, given a known misalignment. This measurement could be performed during operation simply by including a reflective element in the heliostat and two detector arrays on the tower’s surface. This model has been tested for various types of misalignments of a heliostat at different hours, dates, and heliostat locations. The simulation results have been validated by using an experimental setup at a scale of 1:100.2019http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/8997010.1364/OE.27.00A257http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/89970oai:zaguan.unizar.es:89970info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA/T20-17Rinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MINECO/RTC-2016-5226-3OPTICS EXPRESS 27, 8 (2019), A257-A268byhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess