• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.38 no.10
• /
• pp.1310-1317
• /
• 2014

In our daily life, the need of energy increases day by day. However, the amount of natural resources on the earth is limited and thus gaining renewable energy as an energy resource is one of the important and urgent problems. Solar energy is one of the most popular available energy sources that can be converted into electricity by using solar panels. In order for solar panels to produce maximal output power, the incident angle of the sunlight needs to be persistently perpendicular to the solar panel. By the way, most of the solar panels are installed at fixed position and direction. Therefore, as the sun's position changes, it is impossible to produce maximal output power inevitably. To improve this problem, in this paper, a sun tracking system using two degree-of-freedom (DOF) active sensor array is proposed so that the solar panel may always direct sunlight perpendicularly. And also a series of software, such as a search mode and a holding mode, which can control the developed sun tracking system is developed. Several experiments using the implemented sun tracking system are executed and the effectiveness of the system is verified from the experimental results.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.388-396
• /
• 2011

Sun tracking system is the most important subsystem in parabolic dish type solar thermal power plant, since it determines the amount of thermal energy to be collected, thus affects the efficiency of solar thermal power plant most significantly. Various types of sun tracking systems are currently used. Among them, use of photo sensors to located the sun(which is called sensor type) and use of astronomical algorithm to compute the sun position(which is called program type) are two of the mostly used methods. Recently some uses CCD sensor, like CCD camera, which is called image processing type sun tracking system. This work is concerned with the analysis of sun tracking performance of various types of sun tracking systems currently used in the parabolic dish type solar thermal power plant. We first developed a sun tracking error measurement system. Then, we evaluate the performance of five different types of sun tracking systems, sensor type, program type, hybrid type(use of sensor and computed sun position simultaneously), tracking error compensated program type and image processing type. Experimentally obtained data shows that the tracking error compensated program type sun tracking system is very effective and could provide a good sun tracking performance. Also the data obtained shows that the performance of sensor type sun tracking system is being affected by the cloud significantly, while the performance of a program type sun tracking system is being affected by the sun tracking system's mechanical and installation errors very much. Finally image processing type sun tracking system can provide accurate sun tracking performance, but costs more and requires more computational time.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
• /
• v.35 no.5
• /
• pp.460-465
• /
• 2007

This paper deals with the Fine Digital Sun Sensor (FDSS) for Science & Technology Satellite 2(STSAT-2). The FDSS was firstly developed by using CMOS-Image sensor(CIS) in South Korea. This paper will describe the configuration of the FDSS, the design of the optical part, the analysis result of the optical characteristics of the sunlight, and the calibration result measured by solar simulator.

• Journal of Internet Technology
• /
• v.19 no.6
• /
• pp.1801-1810
• /
• 2018

In this study, an energy-aware data-replication is proposed to effectively support a mobile sink in a solar-powered wireless sensor network (WSN). By utilizing the redundant energy efficiently, the proposed scheme shares the gathered data among the cluster heads using a backbone network, in order to increase data-reliability. It also maintains a backup cluster head in each cluster to enhance topological resilience. The simulation result showed that, compared to conventional clustering techniques, the proposed scheme decreases the total amount of data loss from the mobile sink as well as saving its energy (by reducing its moving distance), while minimizing the unexpected blackout time of the sensor node.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
• /
• v.9 no.4
• /
• pp.77-82
• /
• 2020

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) suffer from not only a short lifetime due to limited energy but also an energy imbalance between nodes close to the sink and others. In order to fundamentally solve the short lifetime, recent studies utilize the environmental energy such as solar power. Additionally, WSNs using mobile sinks are being studied to address the energy imbalance problem. This paper proposes an improved CTP (Collection Tree Protocol) scheme which uses these two approaches simultaneously. Basically, it is based on a CTP scheme which is a very popular data collection strategy designed for the typical battery-based WSNs with a fixed sink. Therefore, we tailored it for solar-powered WSNs with a mobile sink. Performance verification confirms that our scheme reduces the number of blackout nodes significantly compared to the typical CTP, thus increases the amount of data collected by the sink.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.22 no.9
• /
• pp.33-40
• /
• 2017

In this paper, we propose a sink-location management and data-routing scheme to effectively support the mobile sink in solar-powered WSN. Battery-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have a limited lifetime due to their limited energy, but solar energy-based WSNs can be supplied with energy periodically and can operate forever. On the other hand, introduction of mobile sink in WSNs can solve some energy unbalance problem between sink-neighboring nodes and outer nodes which is one of the major challenges in WSNs. However, there is a problem that additional energy should be consumed to notify each sensor node of the location of the randomly moving mobile sink. In the proposed scheme, one of the nodes that harvests enough energy in each cluster are selected as the cluster head, and the location information of the mobile sink is shared only among the cluster heads, thereby reducing the location management overhead. In addition, the overhead for setting the routing path can be removed by transferring data in the opposite direction to the path where the sink-position information is transferred among the heads. Lastly, the access node is introduced to transmit data to the sink more reliably when the sink moves frequently.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
• /
• 2017.10a
• /
• pp.450-453
• /
• 2017

In this abstract, the FPGA system using solar tracking is introduced. Solar tracking system combined with sensor tracking and solar altitude programming is utilized. The sensor tracking system consists of image sensor, light sensor, and the programs for sun altitude received by the computer. The sun altitude is received from the national weather database by wireless communication. The goal is to have maximum energy generation efficiency using bi-directional tracking and mixed tracking with FPGAs that are relatively inexpensive in terms of developing and programming the system.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
• /
• 2013.10a
• /
• pp.371-374
• /
• 2013

In this paper, a sensor node circuit using solar energy harvesting is proposed. PMU(Power Management Unit) manages the energy converted from a solar cell. In order to supply a constant voltage to the sensor node, an LDO (Low Drop Out Regulator) is used. The LDO drives a temperature sensor and a SAR ADC(Successive Approximate Register Analog-to-Digital Converter). The circuit has been designed in 0.35um CMOS process.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
• /
• v.43 no.4
• /
• pp.352-361
• /
• 2018

Purpose: The objective of this study was to develop a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model to estimate solar radiation using a solar module. Methods: Data for the short-circuit current of a solar module and other environmental parameters were collected for a year. For MLP learning, 14,400 combinations of input variables, learning rates, activation functions, numbers of layers, and numbers of neurons were trained. The best MLP model employed the batch backpropagation algorithm with all input variables and two hidden layers. Results: The root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of each learning cycle and its average over three repetitions were calculated. The average RMSE of the best artificial neural network model was $48.13W{\cdot}m^{-2}$. This result was better than that obtained for the regression model, for which the RMSE was $66.67W{\cdot}m^{-2}$. Conclusions: It is possible to utilize a solar module as a power source and a sensor to measure solar radiation for an agricultural sensor node.

• Journal of Power Electronics
• /
• v.14 no.6
• /
• pp.1281-1292
• /
• 2014

Photovoltaic (PV) solar systems with series-connected module integrated converters (MICs) are receiving increased attention because of their ability to create high output voltage while performing local maximum power point tracking (MPPT) control for individual solar panels, which is a solution for partial shading effects in PV systems at panel level. To eliminate the partial shading effects in PV system more effectively, sub-MICs are utilized at the cell level or grouped cell level within a PV solar panel. This study presents the results of a series-output-connection MPPT (SOC-MPPT) controller for sub-MIC architecture using a single sensor at the output and a single digital MPPT controller (sub-MIC SOC-MPPT controller and architecture). The sub-MIC SOC-MPPT controller and architecture are investigated based on boost type sub-MICs. Experimental results under steady-state and transient conditions are presented to verify the performance of the controller and the effectiveness of the architecture.