Collaborative distributed sun-tracking control system for building integration with minimal plant area and maximum energy-conversion efficiency

• A new solar collector development for building surfaces integration.
• Scalable tracking system to reduce the space between solar collectors.
• Adequate distributed control system to facilitate the supervision and configuration of building integration solar plants.
• ORSYS is a distributed and collaborative sun-tracking system to improve the energy conversion efficiency of FMSC collectors.

This paper presents a collaborative distributed sun-tracking control system for a novel Fixed Mirror Solar Concentrator (FMSC) structure, which increases the energy-conversion efficiency of the FMSC and reduces the space between solar collectors units, a positive aspect for in-building integration. The improved FMSC uses solar concentration collectors suited for mid-range thermal applications (90–200 °C) and is designed for easy installation in buildings because of its relatively small extension. The proposed solar orientation system (ORSYS) relies on a two-step algorithm to increase the energy captured by the receiver, which provides tolerance to common logical and mechanical errors in the estimation of the receiver position. ORSYS is implemented as a CAN-based distributed system, extended with web-interface features for supervision and configuration of the overall system. ORSYS also includes a coordination algorithm that allows adjacent collectors to share the physical space between them, thus reducing the total plant area. Experimental evaluation has been performed using an industrial-scale solar collector prototype, showing its feasibility and efficiency in terms of energy conversion in real environments.

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