HCPV TRACKER ACCELERATED RELIABILITY TESTS

An accelerated reliability test plan was developed for trackers used in high-concentration photo-voltaic power systems. The potential failure modes of the tracker hardware were used to select the hardware that was tested. The 2-parameter Weibull distribution was used as the underlying time-to-failure distribution since all hardware failures were dominated by wear-out mechanisms. Equations used to help identify degrading bearings and gears were based on vibration frequency analysis. Results show that the accelerated life test identified wear-in as well as wear-out mechanisms. Hardware times-to-failure distributions and tracker reliability estimates were developed.