Design of a wireless heliostat system

Abstract

With the world progressively heading towards an energy crisis, renewable energy sources and technologies have become the focus of research. Harvesting the sun's energy through solar thermal power plants (STPPs) is an attractive alternative to the use of energy supplied through the grid. However, installation and maintenance of cabling for communication and control of a heliostat array for STPPs is costly. In this paper, a wireless heliostat system based on a wireless sensor network is proposed. The system is able to accurately track the sun's position, and cooperatively focus the sunlight onto a target plane using wireless communication for signaling. The latency introduced by wireless communication has no significant impact on system performance, and the proposed system is robust to tilt and wind disturbances.