Tracking Error Analysis of a Rotation-Elevation Mode Heliostat

Abstract

For the past few years, great efforts have been done in improving the tracking accuracy of a newly proposed rotation-elevation tracking mode heliostat. A special simulation program has been developed to systematically analyze the image movement and to find out the error of the parameters. In the simulation program, ray-tracing method was applied to work out the central point position of the master mirror image on the target plane during the primary tracking. From the experiment, less than 5cm of tracking error was achieved with the help of the simulation program. We discussed the error analysis of the two prototypes of so called Non-Imaging Focusing Heliostat (NIFH) in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) which has greatly reduced the optical alignment process and resulting more precise result.