Abstract
Heliostat in the tower type solar thermal power plant is a mirror system tracking the sun's movement to collect the solar energy and it is the most important subsystem determining the efficiency of solar thermal power plant. Thus a good performance of it, which is mostly the accurate sun tracking performance under the various hazardous operating condition, is required. Heliostat control system is a system to manage the heliostat sun tracking movement and other operations. It also communicates with the master controller through the heliostat filed control system to receive and send the informations required to operate the heliostat as a part of the solar thermal power plant. This study presents a heliostat control system designed and developed for the 1MW solar thermal power plant. We first define the functionality of heliostat control system. Then sun tracking controller as well as the sun tracking algorithm satisfying the required functionality have been developed. We tested the developed heliostat control system and it showed a good performance in regulation of heliostat motion and communication.