Portable system for the calculation of the sun position based on a laptop, a GPS and Python

Abstract

The efficient generation of renewable energy coming from a solar system depends strongly on the direction at which the sun rays strike the surface of the solar collector. Therefore, the knowledge at any time of the sun position is very important for most solar systems including those doing sun tracking. In several solar devices, the user manually must provide the values of geographical latitude, geographical longitude, time and date to do tasks as solar tracking or just to know the sun position, which can be tedious, ineffective and error prone. This paper describes the implementation of a portable system to evaluate the sun position using a GPS receiver and a sun position algorithm programmed in Python. The knowledge of the sun position is important to control and operate the solar energy systems. The algorithm results are the sun trajectory, solar azimuth angle, solar altitude angle, latitude, longitude, actual time and sunrise-sunset times.