Research in Solar Tracking - Some Observations

I came across two research papers on design of solar tracking system by same author. The two papers are

1. A sliding mode control for sensorless tracker: Application on a photovoltaic system (International Journal of Control Theory and Computer Modelling (IJCTCM) Vol. 2 No. 2, March 2012.

2. A position control review for a photovoltaic system: dual axis sun tracker (IETE Technical Reveiw, Taylor & Francis, 2011.

Upon reading them I found a huge number of similarities between the two which in my opinion is against the sanctity of the field of scientific research. My first impression was that there is a high degree of plagiarism. Although the author for both papers is same person yet it is against the scientific practice to write same thing is two different journals just by changing some nouns and prepositions and adding a little bit of new but insignificant information. Such practice always has two outcomes

1. The impression of the author is debilitated in the scientific community.
2. The Journal which publishes such work looses its credibility.

Recently I studied a research paper from 2004 about the effect of sun tracking systems on I-V characteristics of solar photovoltaic modules. The title of this paper is " The effect of using sun tracking systems on the voltage-current characteristics and power generation of flat plate photovoltaics". This paper does not show any real work, instead just some pictures from a single day of testing a shown. The author claims to have compared the I-V Characteristics of PV modules by mounting them on different types of tracking systems BUT no metrics have been defined to compare different curves. In short, this paper is a joke.


Another observation is that people researching solar tracking systems confuse "Physical Tracking Systems" with "Maximum Power Point Tracking" both of which are completely different topics.

One such example can be found in following research paper

Lee, C. Y., Chou, P. C., Chiang, C. M., & Lin, C. F. (2009). Sun tracking systems: a review. Sensors, 9(5), 3875-3890.


I will keep updating this blog whenever I find such non-sense.