Smart Computing- Book ISBN- 978-81-953658-1-4

Authors:- Amul Ghodasara, Manish Jangid, Hrishikesh Ghadhesaria, Harshil Dungrani, Brijesh Vala, Ravi Parikh

Abstract :-The main goal of this project is to design an accurate solar tracker and share information through IoT. In this work, sensing of the sun position carried out in two stages, primary and secondary. Preliminary stage or indirect sensing performed via sun-earth relationship as a coarse adjustment and second stage or direct sensing performed via a set of LDR sensors as output tuning to trims the azimuth and altitude angles. If the weather is cloudy or dusty, the tracking system uses primary stage or sun-earth geometrical relationships only to identify the location of the sun; so the system tracks the position of the sun regardless of the weather condition. The energy extracted from photovoltaic (PV) or any solar collector depends on solar irradiance. For maximum energy extraction from the sun, the solar collector panel should always be normal to the incident radiation. Solar trackers move the solar collector to follow the sun path and keep the solar collector's orientation at an optimal tilt angle. Solar tracking system improves the energy efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) panels substantially. The project is divided into two parts; hardware and software. Hardware parts generally composed of solar panels, two motors, an LDR sensor module, temperature sensor, humidity sensor and electronic circuit. The software part represents the thinking behaviour of the system. That is how the system acts under several weather conditions. This paper designs and develops an automatic solar tracking system using Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) and DC motors on a mechanical structure with gear arrangement. It is implemented through an Arduino UNO controller based on Sun-Earth Geometry. The results indicated that the automatic solar tracking system is more reliable and efficient than a fixed one.

Keywords: - Arduino UNO, LDR, Photovoltaic (PV) panel, Solar Tracking System, Humidity Sensor, Temperature Sensor, Omni phobic material, IOT