Characterization of cadmium sulfide light dependent resistors sensors for optical solar trackers

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of dissimilarity of the intrinsic characteristics of the light dependent resistor (LDRs) on optical sun tracking systems, designed for solar power concentration applications such as parabolic trough collectors, Fresnel mirrors concentrators, and concentrated photovoltaic, a comparative study was done between a sun tracker based on LDRs chosen randomly with and without an initial calibration of the offsets, and a sun tracker based on LDRs selected meticulously thanks to a black box test bench, developed especially for this purpose. By choosing two light dependent resistors randomly, the dissimilarity between them can reach 23.2%, which cause a bad sun tracking even with initial offset calibration, in the other hand, and by the use of selected LDRs using the test bench, the dissimilarity drops to 0.06%, which meets requirements of solar power concentration systems.