Othman 2013
Othman 2013
Othman 2013
Abstract — This paper presents the performance analysis of dual- In the last ten years, many residential areas around the
axis solar tracking system using Arduino. The ultimate objective of world used electric solar system as a back-up power for their
this project is to investigate whether static solar panel is better houses. This was because solar energy, which is the energy
than solar tracker, or the opposite. This project is divided into two derived from the sun through the form of radiation, is also an
stages namely, hardware and software development. In hardware
unlimited energy resource and is going to become increasingly
development, five light dependent resistors (LDR) were utilized to
capture the maximum light source from the sun. Two servo motors important in the long term for providing light, heat and energy
also were employed to move the solar panel to maximum light to all living things [2]. It is also related to the aspects of
source location sensed by the LDRs. As for the software part, the deforestation control, protection of ozone layer, reduction of
code was constructed by using C programming language and was CO2 emission and so on [3]. In order to utilize the superiority
targeted to the Arduino UNO controller. The performance of the of solar energy, solar tracker was constructed for this project.
solar tracker was analyzed and compared with the static solar
panel and the result showed that the solar tracker is better than the Solar tracker is a device used to orient a solar panel
static solar panel in terms of voltage, current and power. towards the sun. Since the sun's position in the sky changes
Therefore, the solar tracker is proven more effective for capturing
with the time of day, solar tracker is used to track the maximum
the maximum sunlight source for solar harvesting applications.
amount of light produced by the sun. It is discovered that the
Keywords- Dual-axis, Solar Tracker, Arduino, Light Dependant instantaneous solar radiation collected by the photovoltaic
Resistor modules, assembled in a tracking system, is higher than the
critical irradiance level for longer hours than in fixed systems
I. INTRODUCTION [4]. Besides, it is estimated that the yield from solar panels can
be increased by 30 to 60 percent by utilizing a tracking system
Renewable-energy is energy which comes from natural instead of a stationary array [5]. Up to 40% extra power can be
resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geothermal produced per annum using a variable elevation solar tracker
heat, which are renewable (naturally replenished) [1]. It [6]. Nowadays, there are many types of solar trackers invented
provides 19% of electricity generation worldwide. Malaysia, but the two basic categories of trackers that are widely-used are
with its population of about 28 million people, is one of the single-axis and dual-axis tracker. Single-axis tracker can either
fastest economically growing countries in Asia. In the last has a horizontal or a vertical axis, while dual-axis tracker have
decade, Malaysia managed to achieve almost 20% increase in both horizontal and vertical axis, thus making them able to
energy generation which was from 13,000MW in 2000 to track the sun's apparent motion almost anywhere in the world.
15,500MW in 2009. Under the 8th Malaysia’s plan (2001-
2005), the government of Malaysia changed the Four Fuel In this project, the performance of the dual-axis solar
Policy which was based on oil, gas, coal and hydropower to the tracker was analyzed. It was separated into three parts which
Five-Fuel Policy with the addition of renewable energy as the were input, controller and output. The input was from the
fifth element. The demands for electricity keep increasing year LDRs, the Arduino as the controller and, the servo motor as the
by year, but the main resources which are oil, gas and coal are output.
depleting. Solar energy, which is one of the types of renewable
energy, has been identified by the government as the best
initiative in order to solve this problem.
2) Servo Motor
A. Hardware
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2013 IEEE International Conference on Control System, Computing and Engineering, 29 Nov. - 1 Dec. 2013, Penang, Malaysia
4) Programmer
B. Software
Figure 6. Flow chart of software
The software part consisted of a programming language
that was constructed by using C programming. The codes were
targeted to Arduino UNO board to be compiled and uploaded.
The flow of the software procedure is shown in Figure 6. The
five LDRs were connected to Arduino analog pin A0 to A4 to
act as the input for the system. The built-in Analog-to-Digital
Converter converted the analog value of LDR into digital PWM.
The values of PWM pulse then were applied (exploited?) to
move the servos. The maximum light intensity captured by one
of the LDR inputs was selected and later the servo motor would
move the solar panel to the position of the LDR that was set up
in the programming. There were three points of motor rotation;
0, 90 and 180 degrees. The positions of LDRs were divided into
five positions which were centre, right, left, up and down. These
five positions were the best positions that could detect the
highest intensity of sunlight.
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2013 IEEE International Conference on Control System, Computing and Engineering, 29 Nov. - 1 Dec. 2013, Penang, Malaysia
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2013 IEEE International Conference on Control System, Computing and Engineering, 29 Nov. - 1 Dec. 2013, Penang, Malaysia
6.00p.m. On the contrary, for the static panel, the highest and
the lowest output voltage recordeed were 12.58V and 11.87V
respectively. As shown in Figure 7, the cloud was the main
factor that caused the instability in the measurement of the
output voltage because it bloccked the sun, causing the
surrounding to be dim at certain times. As a result, the solar
panels were not able to receive thee maximum illumination from
the sun.
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2013 IEEE International Conference on Control System, Computing and Engineering, 29 Nov. - 1 Dec. 2013, Penang, Malaysia
REFERENCES
IV. CONCLUSION
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