A Sun Tracking Error Monitor for Photovoltaic Concentrators

With today's PV markets bogged down by the shortage of solar grade silicon a handful of start-ups but also well established manufacturers, try to take advantage of the situation and steadily stride towards the commercialisation of photovoltaic concentration technologies. To aid the completion of their ongoing development cycles, and implement production automation and quality control processes, specific instrumentation and machinery is to be developed. Assessment of sun tracking accuracy should not be overlooked, and even more by those players raising very high concentration concepts over the 100X frontier. Some analyses point out that the acceptance angle of present designs in concentration optics may be overestimated even from a theoretical point of view, which added to the still uncertain acceptance angle losses inflicted on the overall system by mass assembly processes, may finally shrink the allowable tolerance and divert the entire burden to the tracking accuracy. Instrumentation for the monitoring of sun tracking operative performance, providing enough sensitivity to gauge the sub-degree accuracy ranges required by high concentration systems is therefore needed, and technical feasibility of this proposal is proven here based in state-of-the-art solid state image sensors