Digital Signal Processing Techniques for Positioning of Off-Axis Solar Concentrators

This paper will discuss the results of using digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to determine the location of the focal point of an off-axis solar concentrator projected onto a visually complex thruster absorber and secondary concentrator. Once the location of the focal spot is located, position control information is generated to move the concentrator to a location that maximizes power transfer. A program that simulates an off-axis solar concentrator is used to generate binary “image” files to analyze for positioning information. The analysis progresses from Discrete Fourier analysis on the two-dimensional images, through spectrograms, to introduce wavelets and wavelet analysis to conceptually verify the use of DSP techniques to determine position information.