Design of an automatic solar tracking system

Abstract

Modern world is tremendously developing, but on the other hand many natural disasters happening. Global warming has been the main reason for those natural disasters. All these years, fossil fuels are one of the main resources for energy. But scarcity of bio fuels and pollution in other way is a cause for that global warming thus it forces us to find new ways of energy resources. The solutions for this problem lead to studies for clean and renewable energy resources such as wind, water, solar etc. Among them, solar energy is some of the commonly using renewable energy. For those especially the „sun-belt‟ countries are looking into possibilities of using sun energy for their daily needs. Photovoltaic cells are used for this purpose. This will convert solar energy into useful power. But it has limitations due to inconsistent sun light, fluctuating weather conditions etc. This can lead into non-accurate and unreliable current/voltage output. To overcome this issue, we need an advanced control and measurement system that can give an accurate and stable output to the photovoltaic system. Different types of mechanisms are used to improve the efficiency of the solar system. The most appropriate approach for enhancing the efficiency of solar array systems is sun tracking. A microcontroller based design of an automatic solar tracker is presented in this project. This system controls the movement of a solar array such that it is constantly aligned towards the direction of the sun. A small prototype of solar tracking system is constructed to implement the design methodology presented in this project.