Research And Design Of Solar Automatic Tracking Control System

With the development of economy and society all over the world, the demand of energy is increasing everyday. Nowadays in our country, the structure of energy consuming based on fossil energy can not satisfy the stand for sustainable development any more. Serious energy shortage and environmental issues of burning fossil fuels has to be faced to humanity. Based on these reasons, application of solar energy technology becomes the focus of research in many countries. However, the solar energy has the special characteristics that solar light energy density is low, intermittent and spatial distribution is changing all the times and so on. Therefore, the paper studies on solar tracking technology. The solar tracking system can reduce the angle between sun incident light and incidence of solar cell arrays. It can improve the utilization of solar radiation and reduce the cost of power generation system.The paper starts from the present several typical ways of solar tracking used in domestic and international photovoltaic system. Taking into account the basic laws of solar motion, the automatic solar tracking technology is discussed in depth. The paper presents an improvement program in order to solve the existing problems in the tracking technology for the detection of solar orientation. A two-dimensional automatic solar tracking control system based on single step motor is designed and built. The stability of the whole system is tested and verified by the experimental observation. In different weather conditions, the device completes the task of detecting and tracking the sun orientation accurately. The experiment is conducted under a contrast ideal weather conditions in order to test the solar energy collection efficiency of automatic tracking control system. The result shows that the solar collection efficiency of photovoltaic array in the automatic tracking control system can be increased by about 36%. The mechanical structure of the system is comparative simple which largely reduces the device hardware costs and can be widely used in most existing photovoltaic system.