Solar Tracking Systems – A Review

Abstract

The biggest challenge and concern for the upcoming 50 years is the idea of power generation, by making less use of the fossil fuels. The idea of solar energy as fuel, and the fact that we can convert freely available energy which we receive from the sun into usable energy, is fascinating, and is probably at the highest priority at the moment as compared to other renewable energy sources. Although solar energy as fuel is the go-to form of green energy, it is faced with some problems. The two main problems are, first, it is geographically constrained and second is that it is nearly impossible to collect a hundred percent heat energy from the sun at every single point of the day. This happens because the relative angle of the sun changes continuously with respect to the earth. This leads to a problem. The watts delivered by the solar panels gets reduced. Thus, it gets more challenging to generate power. To overcome this problem, developers and researchers came up with an innovative solution, “Solar Trackers”. After a lot of studies and extensive research conducted on this technology, it can staunchly said that solar trackers are the best alternative as compared to static solar panels, for increasing the efficiency. In this paper different types of tracking systems, their setups and comparison in between their performances are reviewed. After carefully analysing and comparing different results obtained from different solar tracking systems, we can say that altitude and azimuth dual axis solar trackers are more coherent, accurate and efficient in collecting the radiation as compared to the traditional static solar panels and the single axis solar trackers. However, we should also consider the fact that the dual axis solar trackers are not pocket friendly and are not feasible to install compared with the single axis solar tracking system.