Forward, Inverse Kinematics and Optimal Design of a Parallel Solar Tracker

Because of the energy crisis and climate change, renewable energy sources have attracted worldwide attention. As an environmentally friendly option, the use of solar energy is becoming increasingly important. The energy conversion efficiency of a solar concentrator is closely related to the angle between the solar radiation and the solar concentrator panel. To collect more solar energy, a sun tracker is required to drive the solar concentrator to track the sun. In this paper, a parallel solar tracker is introduced, and its analytic forward and inverse kinematics are derived using a geometric method. To ensure that the parallel solar tracker can meet the demand of tracking the solar trajectory, workspace and dexterity indices are proposed. Then, the genetic algorithm is employed to optimize the dimension parameters of the parallel solar tracker based on the workspace and dexterity indexes. After opti-mal design, its workspace can reach approximately 90% of the ideal space, and the average dexterity index is reduced to approxi-mately 2.71. The parallel solar tracker with optimized dimension parameters can track the solar trajectory for most of the day.