• 한국태양에너지학회 논문집
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• 제29권2호
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• pp.39-46
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• 2009

Heliostat, as a mirror system tracking the sun's movement, is the most important subsystem determining the efficiency of solar thermal power plant. Thus the accurate sun tracking performance under the various hazardous operating condition, is required. This study presents a methodology of development of the solar ray tracing technique and the application of it in the analysis of sun tracking error due to the heliostat geometrical errors. The geometrical errors considered here are the azimuth axis tilting error and the elevation axis tilting error. We first analyze the geometry of solar ray reflected from the heliostat. Then the point on the receiver, where the solar ray reflected from the heliostat is landed, is computed and compared with the original intended point, which represents the sun tracking error. The result obtained shows that the effect of geometrical error on the sun tracking performance is varying with time(season) and the heliostat location. It also shows that the heliostat located near the solar tower has larger sun tracking error than that of the heliostat located farther.

• 설비공학논문집
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• 제20권11호
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• pp.760-766
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• 2008

The characteristics of heat transfer and pressure drop of several different porous materials which can be used as inserts inside solar volumetric air receivers were experimentally investigated. Generally, porous materials were inserted into solar volumetric air receivers to increase the thermal performance. In the present work, honeycomb (diameter: 100 mm, thickness: 30 mm), laminated mesh (diameter: 100 mm, thickness: 1 mm) are considered as the inserts for the experiment. The experimental apparatus consists mainly of a cylindrical ceramic duct as a receiver and an electric heater as an energy source. This system is an intake open loop, which used as air of working fluid. The temperatures inside the ceramic tube are measured by thermocouples, which are installed at each layer of the porous materials. The pressure-drop experimental apparatus is fabricated alike the above experimental equipment. An acrylic tube is used like as the ceramic tube, which has the same specifications of the ceramic tube. The pressure drop of porous materials inserted in the acrylic tube is measured between front and rear of those by transmitter. The results show that the laminated mesh surpasses the honeycomb of heat transfer and pressure drop increase as the porous material thickness and Reynolds number.

• 제어로봇시스템학회논문지
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• 제18권5호
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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.