Developing a Mini-heliostat Array for a Solar Central Tower Plant: A Practical Experience: A Practical Experience

This paper presents the modeling and control of an array of mini-heliostats developed for a solar central tower plant facility located outside of Hermosillo, Mexico. In order to deal with the real time implementation, an algorithm to significantly reduce the error that emerges in the solar tracking requirements is presented. Heliostats are oriented to reflect solar beam to a central receiver located in top of a tower. The heliostat tracks the apparent sun position with determined periodicity. A digital controller perform the tasks of calculate the control action to drive the actuators. The real time implementation of the control action introduces numerical issues that deviates the solar ray of the desired position. Results show that the proposed control strategy is able to track the solar sun position. The controller is implemented in real time via LabVIEW computational environment and is applied in a solar tower plant facility.