WSN based heliostat control for a solar thermal cooking system

This paper proposes a wireless sensor network based heliostats control method for an industrial scale solar cooking system. Even though different designs are available they have suffered from different problems especially regarding effective tracking, high cost and convenience and other constraints such as scalability and simplicity. This paper, therefore, describes an efficient design that overcomes the earlier problems by using a highly precise astronomical calculation based approach along with wireless communication for efficient tracking of the sun which in turn reduces the overall system cost and simplicity. The proposed system uses a one tier wireless sensor network (WSN). The main feature of this work is the implementation of the highly accurate NREL algorithm, with precision timing provided by a GPS receiver within a low-cost wireless sensor network framework.