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

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• summer
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• pp.1544-1546
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• 2004

This paper describes the element of solar cell's characteristics, photovoltaic system and solar tracking through experiment. Furthermore, it proposes the experiment results of the PV system is contained solar modules, power conditioning system and the solar tracking system using air compress charging energy The experimental results show that the PV system is always operated at maximum power of solar cells and tracking the sun in order to generate efficiently power generation and propose a capability of its application.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.55-62
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• 2001

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.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.22-31
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• 2009

Canting is the optical alignment of mirror facets of heliostat such that the heliostat could focus the energy as a unit concentrator. Canting could improve the optical performance of heliostat and thus improves the efficiency of heliostat and ultimately improves the efficiency of the solar thermal power plant. This study discusses the effect of mirror canting, especially off-axis canting, used to compensate the sun tracking error caused by the heliostat geometrical errors. We first show that the canting could compensate the sun tracking error caused by the heliostat geometrical errors. Then we show that the proper canting time could exist, depending on the heliostat location. Finally we show how much the sun tracking performance could be improved by canting, by providing RMS sun tracking error. The limitation and caution of using canting to improve the sun tracking performance are also discussed.

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

• 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.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.59 no.10
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• pp.1823-1831
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• 2010

This paper proposes an automatic tracking control algorithm for efficiency improvement of photovoltaic generation. Increasing the power of PV systems should improve the efficiency of solar cells or the power condition system. The normal alignment of the PV module always have to run perpendicular to the sun's rays. The solar tracking system, able to improve the efficiency of the PV system, was initiated by applying that to the PV power plant. The tracking system of conventional PV power plant has been studied with regard to the tracking accuracy of the solar cells. Power generation efficiency were increased by aligning the cells for maximum exposure to the sun's rays. Using a perpendicular position facilitated optimum condition. However, there is a problem about the reliability of tracking systems unable to not track the sun correctly during environmental variations. Therefore, a novel control algorithm needs to improve the generation efficiency of the PV systems and reduce the loss of generation. This control algorithm is the proposed automatic tracking algorithm in this paper. Automatic tracking control is combined the sensor and program method for robust control in environment changing condition. This tracking system includes the insolation, rain sensor and anemometer for climate environment changing. Proposed algorithm in this paper, is compared to performance of conventional tracking control algorithm in variative insolation condition. And prove the validity of proposed algorithm through the experimental data.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.392-402
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• 2020

This paper proposes a solar tracking system without photo-sensors. The system can be classified into four modules: Solar Tracking, MPPT, ESS, and Real-Time Monitoring. Nine solar panels, as a basic unit, are adopted with grid structures of different heights to reduce wind influence and to enable solar tracking without photo-sensors. The low-cost MCU implements MPPT method which generates PWM switching signal for boost converter. The unit of ESS consists of three-series and four-parallel lithium-ion batteries in order to enable monitoring for abnormalities in temperature and electrical characteristics of battery. Four MCUs used in the system consists of two AVR Atmega128, and two Raspberry PI, and they exchanges operation informations. Experimental results of the proposed system show the solar tracking performance, the possibility of on-site and remote monitoring and the convenience of maintenance based on IoT technology.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2001.07b
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• pp.1032-1034
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• 2001

As well known, a solar cell has an optimal operating point to be able to get the maximum power $P_{max}$. So, many $P_{max}$ tracking controllers using the line voltage of a solar cell have been popularly used. But it may vary depending on the miss match between the solar cell output and the load. In this paper, we investigate the possibilities of $P_{max}$ control using the current tracking controller and the output voltage and the output current instead of the solar cell output power. And we also examine about the optimal power converter using ZVCS step up and down chopper circuit to operate the solar cell at an optimal voltage using these variables. And then, we show some experimental results to confirm the successful operation.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.111-117
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• 2020

The photovoltaic module has the characteristic that the output power varies according to the amount of insolation. If partial shading occurs in an environment composed of an array, a number of local maximum power points (LMPPs) may be generated according to the shading state. Photovoltaic arrays require global maximum power point tracking due to variations in output characteristics caused by solar radiation and temperature. Conventional algorithms, such as P&O and Incond, do not follow the global maximum power point in a partial shaded solar array. In this study, we propose a technique to follow the global maximum power point by using the correlation of voltage, current, and power in solar arrays. The proposed control technique 2qw validated through simulation and experiments by constructing a 2-kW solar system.