A Parallel Mechanism for Tracking the Sun
In concentrated solar power (CSP) power generating stations,solar energy from a large number of mirror systems,also called heliostats,is concentrated at a receiver and the thermal energy in the solar radiation is converted to electricity.Typically,the sun’s motion is tracked by using the well-known Azimuth-Elevation method or by the Target-Aligned or Spinning-Elevation method.In both these approaches of tracking,the mirror needs to be moved about two axis independently,using two actuators,in a way such that the reflected sun’s radiation is concentrated on a far away receiver in the solar field.In both the methods,the two actuators are in series and the mirror is effectively mounted at a single point.In this paper,we propose the use of a three degree-of-freedom parallel manipulator,namely the 3-RPS parallel manipulator,to track the sun.The proposed 3-RPS parallel manipulator supports the load of the mirror,structure and wind loading at three points resulting in less deflections,and thus much larger mirror can be moved with the required tracking accuracy and without increasing the weight of the support structure.We present the kinematics equations used to determine motion of the actuated prismatic joints in the 3-RPS parallel manipulator such that the sun’s rays are reflected on to a stationary receiver.We present kinematic and finite element based simulation results which demonstrates the advantages of the proposed parallel manipulator.
3-RPS Parallel manipulator Heliostat Solar tracking
R.B.Ashith Shyam Ashitava Ghosal
Department of Mechanical Engineering,Indian Institute of Science,Bangalore,560012,India
国际会议
天津
英文
1-6
2014-07-06（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）