Solar Receiver Automatic Tracking System Research

With China's rapid economic development, residents and enterprises in electricity consumption increased substantially. Coal power plants for its large energy consumption, heavy pollution and low efficiency will certainly be eliminated. People's attention is gradually shifting to renewable energy sources'utilized and development, solar energy will no doubt be the future of human's safest, greenest, optimal alternative energy sources. But solar energy has some problems, for example lower density, intermittent, light direction and strength developed with time evolving and so on, so how to implement solar photovoltaic panels on the position of the sun automatic tracking has become an urgent problem to be solved. Just in this background, this paper presents that video solar energy tracking system based on MATLAB.From the comparative analysis of existing tracking methods in home and abroad, found that now widely used tracking methods has a weakness that can not continuous monitoring of the sun's rays' changed, and integrated other sensing means'advantages and disadvantages, this paper used a video camera as a sensor element tracking sun's position. For the problem that watch the sun for a long time, using the AstroSolar protect it. AstroSolar not only can reduce the harmful radiation of light, but also does not reduce the contrast of the subject and has no effect in the video signal. Video tracking approach not only solved the problem of continuous monitoring of changes in light, but also improves the tracking accuracy.The system removes complex external control circuit, using MATLAB software's powerful data processing capability as the core, through digital image processing technology and fuzzy pattern recognition method to determine the position of the sun. Using of computer's extensive memory space, we can build a database for the coordination of the position of the sun, the database is ready for rainy days or other can not be checked when the signal of sun can't be found, and increase the system's reliability and stability.For the old tracking system abstraction, developed a visualization program interface GUI for interactive, the interface has a time display function and design of the manual control buttons for easy control personnel monitor the site and manual correction. Coordinates of the position of the sun and then after some simple calculation processing as a control signal to control the scene tracking mechanism moves. Site using Siemens S7-200CPU224PLC as the output of the control unit.The method followed by scanning the output control of the actuator runs to achieve automatic tracking.Through this paper produced a simple model, and from the test that rapidly changing the light source position, verify its sensitivity and accuracy, and through the long-term operation and monitoring to verify its high stability. Experimental results show that the device satisfies the requirement of tracking, and achieve the desired purpose of the study. Video solar tracking system is simple, stable performance, real-time, easy maintenance, the use of fuzzy pattern recognition greatly improve the system's intelligence, and has a very good practical value and promotional value.