Design and Prototyping of a Cost-Effective Sun Tracking System for Photovoltaic Panels

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Georgescu ◽  
P. A. Simionescu ◽  
Ilie Tălpăşanu
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Tracking System ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Linear Motor ◽  
Operational Amplifiers ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Output Function ◽  
Input Output ◽  
Photovoltaic Panels ◽  
Transmission Angle

The paper discusses the design and prototype build of a sun tracking system for photovoltaic panels, that consists of a slider-rocker mechanism and a controls system. The slider-rocker is optimized for best transmission angle properties, near linear input-output function and 180 degrees rocker travel. The control system includes three shaded light-dependent resistors pointing in different directions, and operational amplifiers to sense the imbalance in their illumination. The amplified imbalanced signal is used to control the linear motor of the slider-rocker mechanism towards minimizing this imbalance. A small scale prototype of the system has been built and tested successfully.

A Cost-Effective Active Single Axis Solar Tracking Mechanism Based on Weight Imbalance Principle

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Kader ◽  
Muhammad I. Rashad ◽  
Mahmoud Elzouka ◽  
B. M. El-Souhily
Keyword(s):  
Power Consumption ◽  
Tracking System ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Operating Conditions ◽  
Solar Photovoltaic ◽  
Photovoltaic Panel ◽  
Photovoltaic Panels ◽  
Solar Tracking ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Energy Independence

Solar trackers are rising in popularity; they benefit a wide range of applications since distributed solar energy generation can reduce electricity costs and support energy independence. In this paper, a simple solar tracking system is introduced. The system is a package unit that can be mounted on any solar panel. The system consists of an electrical motor connected directly to a sliding mass on a linear bearing. The electrical motor is controlled to slide the weight along the shafts in controlled steps. As a result, the photovoltaic panels are rotated automatically under the effect of controlled weight unbalance in fine angle increments to track solar trajectory without the need for traditional complex or costly mechanisms. Two light dependent resistors (LDR) sensors, mounted onto the surface of the solar photovoltaic panel, are exposed to solar irradiance and used to feed signals to a controller. A model of the solar tracking system is developed using ordinary differential equations, and numerically solved by MATLAB/Simulink™. The power consumption and tracking strategy of the proposed tracking system are estimated under realistic operating conditions (e.g. wind and brakes), and the power consumption is compared to the power generated by the photovoltaic panels. Optimum values for the sliding mass are suggested. Two photovoltaic modules are used to calculate the output parameters of the proposed tracking mechanism.

Urban pollution control strategy: SBR technology to treat agricultural waste from pig farm in Indonesia

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Lindawati Lindawati
Keyword(s):  
Cost Estimation ◽  
Batch Reactor ◽  
Agricultural Waste ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Land Application ◽  
Pig Manure ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Piggery Wastewater ◽  
Pig Farm ◽  
Number Of Customers

Reduction of food rations and shortages is one of the impacts of the increasing human population. Food sector industries then try to cope with the fast growing number of customers. Agribusiness sector gains its popularity in these recent years, including pig farm. The increase trend of animal farming industry is likely to bring increasing pollution problem unless effective treatment methods are used. The main problems related to the pig farm include odor nuisance and pig manure disposal. The existing land application of piggery wastewater is the traditional way to discharge the wastewater. This may yield in land and water contamination, due to the accumulation of unused nutrients by crop plant. A case study of a large commercial pig farm from Australia is proposed to apply in smaller scale in Indonesia. Operational strategies for the small-scale SBR (Sequencing Batch Reactor) treating piggery effluent were developed based on lab-scale experiments. Due to SBR characteristics, which are money-saving and space-saving, it is very suitable to be applied in urban area. An economic evaluation was made of various process options. The cost estimation showed that SBR is a cost effective process, allowing operational batches to be adjusted to reduce unnecessary aeration cost. A reduction in the aeration cost was achieved by shortening the batch time from 24-h to 8-h. A comparison of three different SBR options showed that smaller size reactors could be more flexible and cost effective when compared with the larger ones.

scholarly journals A Study on Vision-Based Backstepping Control for a Target Tracking System

Actuators ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Thinh Huynh ◽  
Minh-Thien Tran ◽  
Dong-Hun Lee ◽  
Soumayya Chakir ◽  
Young-Bok Kim
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Visual Servoing ◽  
Tracking System ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Imaging Geometry ◽  
Control Scheme ◽  
Decoupled Control ◽  
Control Configuration ◽  
A New Technique ◽  
Pointing Control

This paper proposes a new method to control the pose of a camera mounted on a two-axis gimbal system for visual servoing applications. In these applications, the camera should be stable while its line-of-sight points at a target located within the camera’s field of view. One of the most challenging aspects of these systems is the coupling in the gimbal kinematics as well as the imaging geometry. Such factors must be considered in the control system design process to achieve better control performances. The novelty of this study is that the couplings in both mechanism’s kinematics and imaging geometry are decoupled simultaneously by a new technique, so popular control methods can be easily implemented, and good tracking performances are obtained. The proposed control configuration includes a calculation of the gimbal’s desired motion taking into account the coupling influence, and a control law derived by the backstepping procedure. Simulation and experimental studies were conducted, and their results validate the efficiency of the proposed control system. Moreover, comparison studies are conducted between the proposed control scheme, the image-based pointing control, and the decoupled control. This proves the superiority of the proposed approach that requires fewer measurements and results in smoother transient responses.

scholarly journals Identification of Brain Electrical Activity Related to Head Yaw Rotations

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 3345
Author(s):  
Enrico Zero ◽  
Chiara Bersani ◽  
Roberto Sacile
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Activity ◽  
Electrical Stimulus ◽  
Head Movements ◽  
Brain Electrical Activity ◽  
Output Function ◽  
Input Output ◽  
Eeg Signals ◽  
Head Turning ◽  
Identification Technique ◽  
The Brain

Automatizing the identification of human brain stimuli during head movements could lead towards a significant step forward for human computer interaction (HCI), with important applications for severely impaired people and for robotics. In this paper, a neural network-based identification technique is presented to recognize, by EEG signals, the participant’s head yaw rotations when they are subjected to visual stimulus. The goal is to identify an input-output function between the brain electrical activity and the head movement triggered by switching on/off a light on the participant’s left/right hand side. This identification process is based on “Levenberg–Marquardt” backpropagation algorithm. The results obtained on ten participants, spanning more than two hours of experiments, show the ability of the proposed approach in identifying the brain electrical stimulus associate with head turning. A first analysis is computed to the EEG signals associated to each experiment for each participant. The accuracy of prediction is demonstrated by a significant correlation between training and test trials of the same file, which, in the best case, reaches value r = 0.98 with MSE = 0.02. In a second analysis, the input output function trained on the EEG signals of one participant is tested on the EEG signals by other participants. In this case, the low correlation coefficient values demonstrated that the classifier performances decreases when it is trained and tested on different subjects.

scholarly journals Diversity minimization through part combination – a Portuguese railway infrastructure case study

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-94
Author(s):  
Diogo Rechena ◽  
Luís Sousa ◽  
Virgínia Infante ◽  
Elsa Henriques
Keyword(s):  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
Sustainable Services ◽  
Market Needs ◽  
Design Diversity ◽  
Requirement Changes

Abstract With increasing market needs for product and service variety, companies struggle to provide diversity in cost-effective ways. Through standardization of components with a low perceived added value, companies can take advantage of economies of scale while maintaining product diversity. Railway infrastructure managers face similar challenges of providing economically sustainable services while dealing with the costs of maintaining the system diversity. Typically, unintended design diversity stems from design practices in which existing solutions are not reused for new problems and new solutions are rarely planned considering the dynamics of requirement changes. In this paper we provide a methodology to assess how to standardize different designs to minimize design diversity and to assess design divergence in a product family. The developed methodology is able to take into account any set of standardization compatibility constraints that the user can define. The methodology was applied in the context of a small-scale railway infrastructure manager using a dataset of 223 unique designs of functionally similar components from its electrification system. Depending on the activated compatibility constraints, results indicate that over 60% of components can be reduced to a set of 86 unique designs.

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