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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