Design and Implementation of an Energy-Efficient, Low-Cost Robotic Solar Tracker

Abstract

In the recent past, solar panel (Konar and Mandal in IEE Proc A Sci Meas Technol 138:237–241, 1991, [1]) has been under use to convert solar energy into electrical energy. The solar systems can be connected to electrical grids and also be used as a stationary system. The maximum solar power received by the earth is around 84 TW, of this, 12 TW of power is consumed every day by the world. A concept has been proposed (Gruber in Proceedings of IEEE power electronics specialists conference, pp 128–138, 1970, [2], Snyman and Enslin in Proceedings of 20th annual IEEE power electronics specialists conference, vol 1, pp 67–74, 1989, [3], Yang et al. in IEEE Trans Circuits Syst I Regul Pap 59:1546–1556, 2012, [4]) that by using Arduino extract maximum energy from the solar panel (Ram and Rajasekar in IEEE Trans Power Electron 32:8486–8499, 2017, [5]). If the solar panels are placed perpendicular to the Sun maximum amount of solar energy can be extracted (Kim et al. in Proceedings of the 31st intersociety energy conversion engineering conference, vol 3, pp 1673–1678, 1996, [6], Luque-Heredia et al. in Proceedings of 3rd world conference on photovoltaic energy conversion, vol 1, pp 857–860, 2003, [7]). So, it is important to track the Sun’s location and position of the solar panel. In the case of fixed solar panels, energy conversion at morning and evening is less, but it is more at noon (Liu et al. in Proceedings of IEEE 3rd international future energy electronics conference and ECCE Asia (IFEEC 2017—ECCE Asia), pp 932–935, 2017, [8]). As at noon, the solar panel is placed perpendicular to the sun. The proposed work is to design a system to track the sun’s position (Kobayashi et al. in IEEE Trans Industr Electron 53:495–499, 2006, [9]). Photoresistors will be used as sensors in this system. The system consists of light-dependent resistors, Arduino Uno, RC servomotors, and a solar panel. The proposed method will give an output up to 20% more energy than solar panels without entering tracking systems.