Naively I would assume we know where the sun is and how to calculate the angles. What are drones and AI doing?
Should be crazy efficient compared to the terrible alternative which would require something like deliberately de-focusing all other mirrors only to be able to verify that the mirror under test actually does project the sun where expected.
Tempted to keep my initial upvote on the "investor hype" sibling, out of spite for all projects that do, but the ability to check arbitrary points in the nonilluminated volume for accidental illumination must really make do much of a difference I can't. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
Or just put up a big black board with reference points on it, and point a camera at that?
The beauty of the misalignment patrol drone is that it does not leave you guessing wich one exactly of your large number of inexpensive mirrors is out of line. The culprit clearly lights up in the video feed.
You can then use the camera image of the position of the sun spot on the black board to figure out your new calibration settings for this particular mirror.
Yes, you know exactly where the sun is in a global coordinate system.
The problem is that your mirrors are not fixed in that global coordinate system.
You need to continuously re-calibrate the local coordinate system of the mirrors against the global system.
https://www.topconpositioning.com/us/en/solutions/technology...
The reason should be obvious in that the motors are higher maintenance systems so you don’t want to scale with the size of your plant. I imagine drones are being used for a similar purpose: the drones further reduce how many adjusters you need vs rails and the AI is so that the drones can actually adjust the panels.
So you need independent azimuth+elevation for each mirror.
There’s always a performance/cost target you’re trying to hit. Sometimes it’s not about performance at all costs and it’s ok to sacrifice some optimality to get a much cheaper solution.
So while the mirrors are independently adjusted, the there’s a single motor robot on a rail that comes by and custom adjusts each mirror instead of having the mirrors self adjust locally at all times.
You say it's more expensive, do you have a rough estimate of the cost of such a panel (with or without motors) ?
I'm asking because I'm currently working on a small scale automated solar concentrator and I haven't managed to get an idea of how much such a panel costs.
I have only found some sun trackers for photovoltaic panels but they have different angular accuracy requirements than CSP.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/09/04/184005/a-robot-t...