MPD: Mirror Positioning Device &
SOD: Spherical Orienting Device

The Mirror Positioning System (MPD) (Brown, Tonapi, Larochelle, Sharaf-Eldeen)

The goal of this project is to design a device to increase solar radiation onto photo-voltaic (pv) arrays to produce clean energy. Solar tracking is used to reflect solar radiation using a mirror positioning system onto a stationary PV array. The mirror positioning systems consists of a novel spherical five-bar mechanism driven by two servo motors- both fixed to and supported by the base.

The resulting design is a novel two degree of freedom spherical five-bar mechanism capable of positioning the mirror as desired. The mechanism utilizes 180 degree link lengths to increase the rigidity. The mechanism design is inspired by the agile-eye and related works by Prof. Clement Gosselin of Laval University. The new design has several advantages: Novel manipulation of the reflector requires less power than traditional PV array tracking systems; Open-Loop solar tracking is based on well known orbital mechanics so there is no need for sensors to determine the position of the sun; Two degree of freedom spherical motion yields a large singularity free mirror orienting workspace- an altitude range of 40 to 115 degrees and an azimuth range of 24 to 156 degrees.

The Spherical Orienting Device (SOD) (Brown, Tonapi, Green, Lee, Larochelle)

In this project we extended the development of the MPD to a general two degree of freedom spherical device capable of orienting objects with a very large singularity free spherical workspace.