Sun tracker

• US 20080127964A1
• Filed: 01/03/2008
• Published: 06/05/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 11/27/2006
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Jiahua Han
• Original Assignee: Jiahua Han
• Inventors: Han, Jiahua
• Application Number:
  US11/986,482
• Publication Number:
  US 20080127964A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 126/600
• CPC Class Codes: F24S 50/20 for tracking
• CPC Class Codes: H02S 20/32 specially adapted for solar tracking
• CPC Class Codes: Y02E 10/47 Mountings or tracking
• CPC Class Codes: Y02E 10/50 Photovoltaic [PV] energy

Abstract

The basic idea of this invention is to use many small solar energy transfer units like solar cells, each of them is of the same size and installed on the surface of a spherical structure and toward a certain direction in a 3-D space, the position of each unit is saved in a database, by using a comparison unit to compare the output of these solar energy transfer units, the optimized sun direction can be determined; a compass maybe used to install the said sun tracker in a fixed place.

Claims

1. what is claimed is a sun-tracker which is able to determine the optimal direction for a solar energy device to work toward, some solar energy transfer unit is fixed on a basic spherical structure and each of them towards a certain direction, the direction of all said solar energy transfer units around said basic spherical structure represent almost all the directions in a 3-D space, except a small surface area will be used to fix the sun tracker;

if sun tracker is fixed, then the working direction of each solar energy transfer unit is certain and by comparing the output from each solar energy transfer unit, the optimal direction for other solar energy devices located at the same location can be determined.

2. said sun tracker comprising a basic spherical structure, said basic spherical structure could be a spherical or a spherical based polyhedron structure, optionally the polyhedron are a regular polyhedron.

3. said sun tracker comprising polygon solar-energy transfer unit, said polygon solar-energy transfer units are attached to said basic spherical structure or the surface of said polyhedron structure;

optionally each of the said polygons are regular polygons;

all of said polygon solar-energy transfer units are of the same working area, the same photo to electricity, photo to thermo or photo to other kind of energy transfer efficiency;

each of said polygon solar-energy transfer units is fixed on said basic spherical structure surface toward a certain direction, optionally each said polygon solar-energy transfer unit is tangential to said basic spherical structure surface at the attach point or attach surface of said polygon solar-energy transfer unit to said basic spherical structure.

4. said solar-energy transfer unit is able to transfer the solar energy it received to certain output signals like electrical voltage, electrical current, temperature, pressure, stress, strain etc;

said solar-energy transfer unit could be but not limited to photovoltaic cell etc;

optionally electrical resistances or other elements are used to help obtain said output signals from said solar energy transfer units;

optionally a database could be built to store the information such as number, relative location and working direction of each solar energy transfer units;

a compare circuit is used to calculate out the one with the maximum output and the one with the minimum output, optionally a small controller with some or all of these functionalities are included, like comparison functions, memory functions ets.