Direct and Indirect Sensing Two Axis Solar Tracking System

The main goal of this project is to verify precise solar tracker. The project is split into 2 parts; hardware and software system. Hardware part generally composed of solar panel, Servo motors with gearbox, LDR sensor module, RTC and electronic circuit. Software half represents the thinking behavior of the system, that is how the system acting under several weather conditions. In this work sensing of the sun position carried out in two stages primary and secondary. Primary stage or indirect sensing performed via sun-earth relationship as a rough adjustment and second stage or direct sensing performed via set of LDR sensors as output standardization to trims the azimuth and altitude angles. If the weather is cloudy or unclean, the tracking system uses primary stage or sun-earth geometrical relationships only to identify the location of the sun; so the system tracks the position of the sun regardless the atmospheric phenomenon. The energy extracted from photovoltaic (PV) or any solar furnace depends on star irradiance. For maximum extraction of energy from the sun, the solar collector panel should always be normal to the incident radiation solar trackers moves the solar collector to follow the sun path and keeps the orientation of the solar collector at an optical tilt angle. Solar trailing system improves considerably the energy potency of electrical phenomenon (PV) panel. In this paper, an automatic dual axis solar tracking system is designed and developed using Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) and DC motors on a mechanical structure with gear arrangement. Two-axis star trailing (azimuth angle similarly as altitude angle) is enforced through Arduino UNO controller supported Sun-Earth pure mathematics. The results indicated that the automated star trailing system is additional reliable and economical than mounted one.