Design and Construction of a Low Cost of Solar Tracker Two Degree of Freedom (DOF) Based On Arduino

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increase in the demand for solar panel installations. Unfortunately, it is mostly in a fixed surface or is in a stationary position. Hence, the power generated by the photo-voltaic (PV) cells decreases significantly according to different variations in solar radiation throughout the day. To increase the solar power generation, this paper proposes the design and construction of a two low-cost DOF solar tracker that follows the direction of the sun with a simple construction yet great precision. The system uses a closed- loop system where the light intensity is used as a reference for comparison by the Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) as an analog input to the Arduino and as a system controller. The tracking strategy uses the LDR orientation capability which can be divided into four directions, consisting of one direction, two directions, three directions and four directions of sunlight incident to the LDR sensor. The solar tracking system used is implemented in the Pseudo-Azimuths system which rotates from east to west and from north to south. In the experiment, the comparative evaluation between the 2 DOF solar tracking system and the static solar panel system is the main point of comparison in order to find out more reliable system. From the results of the tests, the results show that the proposed method increases the efficiency of the electrical energy of PV modules with an average value of 36.2% compared to a fixed model.