Novel ANFIS Based Control for Solar Energy Heliostats

Solar central receiver or "power tower" thermal energy systems demand high precision heliostat tracking. Large numbers of heliostats in the field need to precisely track their own targets. Such a scenario suggests a hierarchical control architecture in which a model based controller could occupy the supervisory level. A novel two-level control architecture consisting of the NREL SPA (Solar Position Algorithm) and ANFIS (Artificial Neural and Fuzzy Inference System) as supervisory control is presented. The ANFIS system offers reduced complexity and allows for the quick simulation of various heliostat geometries without solving the kinematics. The initial system design, simulation and tracking results using Matlab SimMechanics and Simulink are given here.