Design and Fabrication of an Automatic Solar Tracking System & Comparative Analysis with Stationary Panel 

Solar energy is considered to be one of the most promising renewable energies. Energy generated from the sun transmitted in the form of light energy is converted into electrical energy using solar cells. This technology is widely used, the main use of solar panels is mostly in the static flat-plate scheme based on pre-determined angles. As a result, because of the variation of solar irradiation with the progress of daytime, the energy conversion is found to be decreased prominently. For serving the purpose of getting maximum power possible, this study represents a microcontroller-based energy-efficient automatic solar-tracking system. This system helps in the alignment of solar panels with the direction of the sunlight as per the changing position of the sun for maximizing power generation. The tracking system has been implemented using the necessary hardware setup and a program that controls the respective hardware. Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) sensor has been used as the input for the system to detect the brightness level of sunlight. The solar panel can rotate along with the horizontal (east-west) axis and the vertical axis depending on the intensity of the sunlight calculating input of LDR sensor. Two servo motors have been utilized for tracing the sun position. In this study, the designed tracking system has been compared to a stationary flat-plate system (30⁰ south facing horizontal) for the comparative analysis of power generation. The experimental result shows that the designed tracking system increased the power generation efficiency by 44.38% compared with the stationary panel. The result also indicates that in the mostly cloudy region the stationary panel will be more convenient than the automatic tracking system as in that case sunlight remains defused. But on regular sunny days, this proposed system over-performs existing stationary panel systems.

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