20-10-2014, 09:56 AM
Abstracts: Renewable energy resources are getting priorities in the whole world in order to provide a sustainable power production and safe world to the future generation. Solar energy is rapidly gaining the focus as an important means of expanding renewable energy uses. Solar trackers are the most appropriate and proven technology to increase the efficiency of solar panels through keeping the panels aligned with suns position. A microcontroller based design methodology of an automatic solar tracker is presented in this work. The unit controls the movement of solar panel always aligned towards the direction of the sun, due to this maximum thermal energy would be culminated from solar panel. Sun always moves from east to west direction independent of weather condition, so with this concept without using sensors movement of the solar panel from east to west direction is done with the help of programme loaded into the microcontroller. This prototype is designed for single axis as well as for double axis to solve solstice problem. From hardware testing we come to know that solar tracking system tracks the sun precisely and provides more power at the output as compared to that static solar panel.