Abstract
Solar energy harvesting is blooming across the world, and it is being used for variety of applications; storing the electricity generated from the sunshine for future use is one among these. Batteries are the main components used in off grid solar power harvesting systems to store the power generated from sun light. For storing the electricity into the batteries, we need charge controllers which will control the amount of current flowing into a battery. Conventional battery chargers may fail in monitoring the battery health and are not so intelligent to decide when to charge battery, and are unable to detect faults in a battery charging circuit. Most of time solar panels are mounted on a roof or on poles; due to this the solar modules will not get the enough sunshine to generate electricity throughout the day. And hence the conversion efficiency will be very less. If we use some mechanism to make solar panels to be facing the sun always, we can maximize the incidence of sun radiation on the panel surface and hence the efficiency; this mechanism that makes the solar panel to move according to the sun position is known as solar tracker. In this paper design of an efficient battery charger and smart single axial solar tracker is proposed and developed; that will take care of battery health and monitor the charging and discharging of battery (like deep discharging, overcharging protection, and control of external loads).And also has an option to charge battery using AC supply in case of low light intensity (during rainy seasons and night hours). The single axis solar tracker will track the sun moment throughout the day and rolls back to the east position once sun sets, and waits for sun to rise. This makes solar panel always facing the sun and enhances the overall system efficiency. The battery charger and solar tracker control programs are implemented in an advanced microcontroller– ARM7 (LPC2148) which has most advanced features compared to other microcontrollers.
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