Design of Tracking System for Photovoltaic Solar Panel

Kok, Wei Cheng (2021) Design of Tracking System for Photovoltaic Solar Panel. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

A solar tracker is a device that used to track the orientation of Sun that will move from east and west daily and also move depends on the seasonal change. The solar system that installed with solar tracker will minimize the angle of incident between the light from the Sun and the PV solar panel. The efficiency of solar system will increase because the solar tracker increases the amount of electrical energy produced by converting the light energy. In short, the solar system with tracking system is very important a solar power is the best alternative source of energy to produce electrical energy because it is unlimited and eco-friendly. In this report, the real time based solar tracking system for photovoltaic panels and the programming will be developed. This report presents designs of real time based single axis solar tracking system for photovoltaic solar panel. Besides that, 3-Dimensional solar tracking design was implemented by using Solidworks. The engineering analysis such as linear static analysis and fatigue analysis was done by using Solidworks to simulate the results of structure stability. In this this report, it comprises of hardware and software design for solar tracking system. The hardware components in automation system of solar tracker have Arduino Uno, microcontroller, real time clock device (RTC) and servo motor. For hardware components in holding system of solar tracker are mounting structure and stand structure. Moreover, the software that used to design solar tracker are Arduino IDE software and Solidworks. Lastly, the performance analysis between single axis solar tracking system and fixed solar system was performed in this report. The analysis results show that there is 38.03% of performance improvement in morning session while 20.19% of performance improvement in the afternoon session when the single-axis solar tracking system is used.