Application of CMAC neural network to solar energy heliostat field fault diagnosis

Abstract

Solar energy heliostat fields comprise numerous sun tracking platforms. As a result, fault detection is a highly challenging problem. Accordingly, the present study proposes a cerebellar model arithmetic computer (CMAC) neutral network for automatically diagnosing faults within the heliostat field in accordance with the rotational speed, vibration, and temperature characteristics of the individual heliostat transmission systems. As compared with radial basis function (RBF) neural network and back propagation (BP) neural network in the heliostat field fault diagnosis, the experimental results show that the proposed neural network has a low training time, good robustness, and a reliable diagnostic performance. As a result, it provides an ideal solution for fault diagnosis in modern, large-scale heliostat fields. © 2013 Neng-Sheng Pai et al.