Tracking mechanism and cosine effect study of Module-Heliostat Solar Collector

Concentrated solar power is one of the most promising technique for significantly reducing the consumption of fossil fuels. In this paper, a quasi-two-dimensional tracking solar concentrator-module heliostat (M-H) collector and its tracking mechanism are discussed. Comparing to the traditional two-dimensional tracking method, the M-H system only track the azimuth angle of the sun in real time, while the other dimension, the elevation angle, is changed once a day. This tracking method make it possible to achieve low cost, precise, and robust tracking. To quantitatively determine the efficiency, the cosine loss of this system is calculated. The result indicates that the cosine loss of M-H collector is as low as 1%.