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• Solar Tracker Platform Development for Energy Efficiency Improvement of Photovoltaic Panels

  1-6.

  Csaba Szász

  Views:

  165

  Solar energy systems have emerged over the last decades as the cleanest and most abundant renewable energy resources available worldwide. Solar trackers are devices specially developed to enhance the energy efficiency of solar energy systems. This paper presents the design and implementation stages of a reconfigurable hardware technology-based two-axis solar tracker platform, specially conceived to improve the energy efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) panels. The main module of this platform is the NI-MyRIO ready-to-use development system built upon a high-performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) processor that controls the entire solar tracker unit. Optimal tracking of the sun movement and obtaining the maximal energy efficiency rate is achieved by simultaneous real-time controlling both the captured sunlight intensity and PV cell temperature magnitudes. In this way, a robust and versatile positioning system has been developed that performs a high precision and accurate tracking pathway. All the control algorithms are implemented there under the LabView graphical programming software toolkit. The final solution boosts in a useful and modularized tracking system that looks useful in a wide range of applications both in industrial and domestic project sites with different power scales.

• Benefits of Cyber-Physical Systems Modeling and Simulation with LabView

  1-6

  Csaba Szász

  Views:

  160

  Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) as part of the Industry 4.0 strategy, represents one of the most challenging research topic for engineers. It’s well known that CPSs integrate at highest level digital technology (computation, control and networking) into physical objects. However, by incorporating various heterogeneous subsystems with different energy levels and functionalities, both analogue and digital signals management, as well as a large scale of communication and information technologies, their modeling and simulation becomes a difficult engineering task. In the past years a huge number of research papers has been dedicated to identify and develop modeling techniques and simulation toolkits being able to handle CPSs complexity. Following these trends, this paper is focused to research and evidence issues linked with the LabView graphically oriented programming technology utilization for CPSs modelling and simulation purposes. Both advantages and shortcomings of this very special technology are studied in order to design and implement a viable software framework being able to model and simulate various CPS structures. As a concrete example, a specific CPS configuration consist of six computer-based mechatronic systems that constitute a laboratory-prototype manufacturing plant has been chosen for LabView-based modeling and simulation. Various virtual instrument-type models of this setup has been conceived and proposed for real-time simulation. It has been concluded then that the application of LabView technology lead to interesting and useful results. The paper specially highlights the benefits and versatility of LabView utilization for complex CPSs modeling and simulation purposes.