Abstract

This paper presents the control system design of a new high flux solar furnace that is being developed in Mexico at the Center for Energy Research of the National University of Mexico. The control of the whole system is critical for the correct operation of it. The control system consists of a rugged PC running state machine-based software which manages the operation of all the user interfaces for the furnace systems which are the heliostat, shutter, cooling, visual and data acquisition subsystems, as well as the positioning desk control. The control routines run in real-time controllers dedicated for each subsystem. The computer routines used by the main program and the tests made for characterizing the heliostat follow-up system is also described. Preliminary results obtained shows that the heliostat control presents great versatility due to the type of control it has, including the possibility of accepting feedback through images projected by it.