What is a heliostat?

Heliostat is a device equipped with set of mirrors and tracking mechanism. Its task is to redirect the sun rays at place chosen by its user. By making constant adjustments of mirrors reflected sunlight is held at same spot regardless of sun movement across the sky.
Earliest manually operated heliostats was used around 17 century for astronomical observations navigation porpoises. Today they are mainly used in solar thermal power plants concentrating sunlight into heat exchanger which turns water into superheated steam which is propelling the turbine linked with electric power generator.

Natural lighting

Natural lighting has undeniable, well researched benefits for human health, we use to live in daylight throughout thousands of years.
No matter of season, some parts of every building are descent to always be in the shadow. The long consider idea to address this issue was usage of heliostats as secondary source of sunlight. It was quickly realized that is many technical challenges is the way.
In order to true "magic" happened, heliostat mirrors must be moving extremely smooth and accurate. Any smallest movements creates annoying flickering effect at best, to periodically loosing target in other cases making rather annoying than pleasant experience.
Heliostat reflection quality depends a lot of its actuation rate. It can be compared to TV screen refresh rate - it should be fast as possible. Equally important is accurate heliostat leveling in respect to the ground, which in normal circumstances requires specialized geodetic equipment.

Only latest technical advancements, combined with ingenuity and true passion let us resolve all that challenges. We developed a heliostat system that will exceed yours highest expectations.

Precision

Precision is crucial for any heliostat performance. Even a fraction of degrees error resulting a visible drift of sun reflection, growing bigger with increasing distance.
For that reason we developed a special non-backlash drive combined with high resolution angular encoders, resulting accuracy within 0.003 degree. That means, mirror reflection far as 100meters will hold its position within 5mm!
Thanks to leading edge microcontroller used in control unit, complex celestial algorithms are made each second, making mirrors movement absolutely fluid and unperceivable to human eye.
Our system is also equipped with special leveling tool which enables in easy steps to achieve leveling alignment within 0.01deg.

Design

A whole design is mostly dictated by means of maximal strength with smallest footprint and minimal material usage - same priorities as nature have. A properly engineered things looks and feel natural. All design was refined many times until reaching as we believe - perfect form.

Safety and Robustness

Putting in mind that our heliostat will usually work in in inhabited area we put special care on safety. Mechanism is physically incapable of excreting torque greater than 50Nm. System has also automatic wind protection. In case detecting high wind heliostat will switch the mirrors to ground parallel position.

Ease of use

In order to fully use all benefits and make user friendly as possible, we added a long range remote control functionality. That gives a unique feature of setting multiple target points (up to 9). System is equipped with two remote controllers with possibility to program another five units (any 433 MHz remote controller)
  Now by pressing a button you can switch on the second sun!

Performance

Our heliostat is unidirectional which means it can reflect sun from any position on sky to any position around, up or below. Due to fast traveling speed target change is taking only a seconds. All system has very low power consumption - 2.8W during operation, and 0.1W over night, making it perfectly capable of stand-alone operation with small solar panel.

Additional capabilities

Mirror system used in our Heliostat has an unique variable geometry, giving it possibility to focus light up to 10x magnification. This solution is ideal for emerging hybrid solar lighting systems (HSL) which work by channeling sunlight through fiber optics to designated locations in building.
Whole system has also embedded solar tracker functionality and internal low-resistance cables which enables it to work with PV panels.
Tracking mechanism can be also operated directly through USB port and provided PC software.

Longevity

We believe that any object should serve its user as long as it is possible. That philosophy guides as at every step of whole design process. All movement components was tested in length of 20.000 full cycles which correspond to over 50 years of operation.

Our mission

Switching to renewable sources is unavoidable future, We want to show that solar power can be fascinating and desirable.



contact@novasolarsystems.com