• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.64 no.12
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• pp.1761-1767
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• 2015

This paper deals with the solar tracking performance using a small heliostat, the light reduction rate of the sun light, and the performance of uniform irradiation of LED light for a plant factory. A high precision encoder is attached to the heliostat to improve tracking accuracy. As a result, our heliostat-based solar tracking systems track efficiently the movement of the sun light in experimental tests. The reduction rate of the sun light in the plant factory is then measured by using an illumination sensor. The average reduction rate is 4.29%, which represents lower light reduction rates. In uniform irradiation tests of LED light, sixteen points are measured, and overall deviations of irradiation were within eight percents.

• 한국태양에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.04a
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• pp.31-36
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• 2009

There have been many solar tracking systems developed for the high accuracy in solar tracking. One of the key components of any motion control system is software. LabVIEW offers an ideal combination of flexibility, ease-of-use and well-integration with other I/O pieces for developing solar tracking system. Real-time solar positions which vary with GPS's data are used simultaneously to control the solar tracker by a chain of operating modes between the open and closed loops. This paper introduces a step by step procedure for the fabrication and performance assessment of a precision solar tracking system. The system developed in this study consists of motion controllers, motor drives, step-motors, feedback devices and application. CRD sensors are applied for the solar tracking system which play a primary role in poor conditions for tracking due to a gear backlash and a strong wind. Mini-dish was used as a concentrator for collecting sun light. The solar position data, in terms of azimuth and elevation, sunrise and sunset times was compared with those of KASI(Korea Astronomy & Space Science Institute). The results presented in this paper demonstrate the accuracy of the present system in solar tracking and utilization.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.191-196
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• 2014

The solar water heating system is one of the seven green campus items installed at the Gangneung campus of Gangneung-Wonju National University. The solar water heating system has two types of solar collectors, four storage tanks and monitoring equipment. Fixed and azimuth-tracking solar collectors were installed to collect heat from the sun. The amount of heat collected by the two different types of solar collectors was calculated from the temperature of the monitored storage tanks. Our results showed that the amount of solar heat collected by the azimuth-tracking solar collector was 19% greater on a sunny day and 23% greater on a rainy day than that collected by the fixed solar collector; therefore, the azimuth-tracking solar collectors are, on an average, 21% more efficient than the fixed solar collectors.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.19-25
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• 2004

A numerical study is performed to investigate the effect of sun tracking on the thermal performance of the evacuated compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) collectors. The evacuated CPC collectors consist of a two-layered glass tube, a copper tube and a reflector. The collector has a copper tube as an absorber and a reflector inside a glass tube. The water is used as a working fluid. The length and the diameter of the glass tube are 1,700mm and 70mm, respectively. The length and the diameter of the copper tube are 1,700mm and 25.4mm, respectively. Ray tracing analysis is carried out in order to compare absorbed heat fluxes on the absorber surface of the stationary and tracking collectors. The collected energy is calculated and compared with that on a fixed surface tilted at $35^{\circ}$ on the ground and facing south. The results indicate that the collected solar energy of the sun tracking system is significantly larger than that of a stationary collector. The sun tracking evacuated CPC collectors show a better performance with an increase in the thermal efficiency of up to 14% compared with an identical stationary collector.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.39-45
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• 2017

This paper presents the effect of solar collectors on the performance of solar tracking daylighting systems. A series of measurements were made for two different types of solar collectors mounted on double axis solar trackers: Parabolic dish concentrator and Fresnel Lens. Indoor light levels were measured at different locations of an office space (longitude: 126.33 E, latitude 33.45 N) as photo sensors were placed on a task plane 80 cm above the floor. To accurately monitor the applicability of the systems, measurements were performed under clear and overcast sky conditions with the roll-screen (on the south window) in the down position. Comparing the illuminance data, the system with Fresnel lens outperformed that of parabolic dish concentrator. On clear days, the former delivered the light levels of 400~600 lux on the task plane whereas the latter recorded 100~200 lux. Depending on the amount of cloud cover, on overcast days, illuminance readings fluctuated to some extent.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.502-508
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• 2012

Heliostat, as a concentrator to reflect the incident solar energy to the receiver, is the most important system in the tower-type solar thermal power plant since it determines the efficiency and ultimately the overall performance of solar thermal power plant. Thus, a good sun tracking ability as well as a good optical property of it are required. Heliostat sun tracking system uses usually an open loop control system. Thus the sun tracking error caused by heliostat's geometrical error, optical error and computational error cannot be compensated. Recently use of sun tracking error model to compensate the sun tracking error has been proposed, where the error model is obtained from the measured ones. This work is a development of heliostat sun tracking error measurement and compensation method using BCS (Beam Characterization System). We first developed an image processing system to measure the sun tracking error optically. Then the measured error is modeled in linear polynomial form and neural network form trained by the extended Kalman filter respectively. Finally error models are used to compensate the sun tracking error. We also developed the necessary image processing algorithms so that the heliostat optical properties such as maximum heat flux intensity, heat flux distribution and total reflected heat energy could be analyzed. Experimentally obtained data shows that the heliostat sun tracking accuracy could be dramatically improved using either linear polynomial type error model or neural network type error model. Neural network type error model is somewhat better in improving the sun tracking performance. Nevertheless, since the difference between two error models in compensation of sun tracking error is small, a linear error model is preferred in actual implementation due to its simplicity.

• KIEAE Journal
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.113-118
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• 2012

The photovoltaic is one of the most important sustainable technologies appliable to architectures. The power performance mainly depends on the installation conditions of them. This study aims to evaluate the power performance of photovoltaic system by the installation conditions, the tracking methods and reflecting mirrors. For the study, the Solar Pro computer simulations have been conducted on installation angles, solar azimuth and solar altitude. Also, the field mock-up tests are performed to of its application to verify the simulation results. Both the results of the experiment and the simulation have proved that the efficiency of 90-degree fixed angle method was higher than that of 30-degree fixed angle, the efficiency of altitude tracking was better than that of azimuth tracking method, and changing both the altitude and the azimuth together is more efficient rather than the shortened tracing way. In addition, the light-concentrating method in which the incidence angle of the sun is controlled by an adhered reflector has been analyzed to have better efficiency than the general method of tracing according to the orbit of the sun. Therefore, this thesis is expected to offer the basic data to set a more effective tracing-type of photovoltaic power generation system in the future. For this, more researches are to be conducted hereafter on a high efficiency drive motor and the establishment of an economic system.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.1-11
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• 2009

Heliostat sun tracking accuracy could be the most important requirement in solar thermal power plant, since it determines the overall efficiency of power plant. This study presents the effect of geometrical errors on the heliostat sun tracking performance. The geometrical errors considered here are the mirror canting error, encoder reference error, heliostat position error. pivot offset and tilt error, gear backlash and mass unbalanced effect error. We first investigate the effect of each individual geometrical error on the sun tracking accuracy. Then, the sun tracking error caused by the combination of individual geometrical error is computed and analyzed. The results obtained using the solar ray tracing technique shows that the sun tracking error due to the geometrical error is varying almost randomly. It also shows that the mirror canting error is the most significant error source, while the encoder reference error and gear backlash are second and the third dominant source of errors.

• Current Photovoltaic Research
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.122-125
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• 2013

The Floating Photovoltaic System was installed on the surface of water. There were some researches in this subject. But there was not many studies with experiment on a high waterproof Floating Photovoltaic modules. The aim of this study was to analyze the performance of the Floating Photovoltaic System. For this experiment, a high waterproof Floating Photovoltaic modules were designed and applied to the module capacity of 10 kW Tracking-Type structure. The experiment results indicated the performance of the daily production is 51.6 kW; the production capacity of Floating Photovoltaic System is expected to be 23% higher than that of the ground-mounted photovoltaic system.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.7
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• pp.711-719
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• 2010

Heliostat, as a concentrator reflecting the incident solar energy to the receiver located at the tower, is the most important system in the tower-type solar thermal power plant, since it determines the efficiency and performance of solar thermal plower plant. Thus, a good sun tracking ability as well as its good optical property are required. In this paper, we propose a method to compensate the heliostat sun tracking error. We first model the sun tracking error, which could be measured using BCS (Beam Characterization System), by multilayered neural network. Then the extended Kalman filter was employed to train the neural network. Finally the model is used to compensate the sun tracking errors. Simulated result shows that the method proposed in this paper improve the heliostat sun tracking performance dramatically. It also shows that the training of neural network by the extended Kalman filter provides faster convergence property, more accurate estimation and higher measurement noise rejection ability compared with the other training methods like gradient descent method.