Abstract
Solar energy is one of the most promising types of renewable energy. Flat facet solar concentrators were proposed to decrease the cost of materials needed for production. They used small flat mirrors for approximation of parabolic dish surface. The first prototype of flat facet solar concentrators was made in Australia in 1982. Later various prototypes of flat facet solar concentrators were proposed. It was shown that the cost of materials for these prototypes is much lower than the material cost of conventional parabolic dish solar concentrators. To obtain the overall low cost of flat facet concentrators it is necessary to develop fully automated technology of manufacturing and assembling processes. Unfortunately, the design of known flat facet concentrators is too complex for automation process. At present we develop the automatic manufacturing and assembling system for flat facet solar concentrators. For this purpose, we propose the design of flat facet solar concentrator that is convenient for automatization. We describe this design in the paper. At present, almost all solar-energy plants in the world occupy specific areas that are not used for agricultural production. This leads to a competition between the solar-energy plants and agriculture production systems. To avoid this competition, it is possible to co-locate solar-energy devices in agricultural fields. The energy obtained via such co-location can be used for agricultural needs (e.g., water extraction for irrigation) and other purposes (e.g., sent to an electrical grid). In this study, we also describe the results of an investigation on co-location methods for the minimal loss of agricultural harvest too.
Recommended Citation
E. Kussul et al., "Solar Concentrators Manufacture and Automation," Open Physics, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 93 - 103, De Gruyter, Apr 2019.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1515/phys-2019-0011
Department(s)
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Center/Lab(s)
Center for High Performance Computing Research
Keywords and Phrases
Agricultural Field; Automation Of Manufacturing And Assembling Process; Co-Location; Computational Vision; Flat Mirror Solar Concentrator; Neural Networks; Parabolic Dish Solar Concentrator; Solar Concentrator
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
2391-5471
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2019 De Gruyter, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Apr 2019
