A Performance Evaluation of Sensor Type Sun Tracking System

센서식 태양추적시스템의 추적정밀도 평가

A parabolic dish concentrator used in a high temperature application of solar energy tracks the sun's movement by two axis sun tracking system. In such a system, sun tracking performance affects the system efficiency directly. Generally the higher the tracking accuracy is, the better the system performance is. A large number of parabolic dish type concentrators has been developed and implemented in the world. However none of them clearly provided a qualitative method of how the accuracy of the sun tracking system can be evaluated. The work presented here is the evaluation of sun tracking performance of parabolic dish concentrator, which follows the sun's movement by the sensor, using a computer vision system. We install a camera on the parabolic dish concentrator. While the concentrator follows the sun, sun's images are captured continuously. Then the performance of sun tracking system was evaluated by analyzing the variation of the position of the sun in the captured images.