IOT Based Solar Tracking System for Efficient Power Generation
Abstract
The main goal of this project is to design a very precise solar tracker and share the information through IoT. 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 coarse adjustment and second stage or direct sensing performed via set of LDR sensors as output tuning to trims the azimuth and altitude angles. If the weather is cloudy or dusty, 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 weather condition. The energy extracted from photovoltaic (PV) or any solar collector depends on solar 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 optimal tilt angle. Solar tracking system improves substantially the energy efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) panel. The project is divided into two parts; hardware and software. Hardware part generally composed of solar panel, two-DC motors, LDR sensor module, electronic circuit. Software part represents the thinking behaviour of the system, that is how the system acting under several weather conditions. In this paper, an automatic solar tracking system is designed and developed using Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) and DC motors on a mechanical structure with gear arrangement. It is implemented through Arduino UNO controller based on Sun Earth Geometry. The results indicated that the automatic solar tracking system is more reliable and efficient than fixed one.
Keywords: Arduino UNO; LDR; Photovoltaic (PV) panel; Solar Tracking System; voltage Sensor; Internet of Things(IoT).
