Design and construction of a solar tracking system for Linear Fresnel Concentrator

Abstract

An open circuit solar tracking system has been designed, manufactured, simulated and implemented for a handcrafted prototype of a small scale linear Fresnel reflector with a single axis of motion. The electronic control system is governed by an Arduino UNO R3 board and two main auxiliary systems; a Microstep Driver TB6600 and an RTC DS1302 module. Further, a mechanism was implemented that joins the reflectors to a stepper motor that executes a single movement per sequence, to move the set of reflector mirrors that make up the reflection system of the device. The positioning angles of the reflectors determined by the control algorithm models for solar tracking, allowed to feed the TONATIUH software to evaluate the path of the solar rays through the 3D modeling of the Linear Fresnel reflector on a real scale. The software was designed to follow the path of the sun by means of astronomical equations. In this way, the mirrors of the Linear Fresnel reflector can follow the solar path on a single axis from 7 am to 5 pm, making changes in the position of each element in 15-minute intervals. The percentage of position deviation of the reflectors does not exceed 1% between the location of the full-scale system mirrors and the position angles provided by the control algorithm. The efficiency of the implemented automatic solar tracking system increased by more than 50% compared to the manual tracking system.