Development of a Time Controlled Based Solar Radiation Tracking System

Abstract

The increase in daily use of electricity with limited in the amount of fossil fuel necessitated researchers to explore other methods of producing energy. Many renewable sources of electricity are in existence, one of the cheapest, free and the most abundant renewable source of energy is the electricity generated from the sun. Electricity from solar radiation is environmentally friendly as it poses no harmful hazard to the surrounding. Today, radiation from the sun can be harnessed with the use of the photovoltaic material like the solar panel. It was observed that the sun direction keeps changing during the day as a result of the rotation of the earth and obtaining maximum amount of solar energy from a fixed solar panel cannot be totally achieved throughout the day. To this extend, a time controlled base solar radiation tracking system was developed. The developed system is capable of continuously changing the direction of sun module as the sun transverse the sky with the use of an intelligent fuzzy rules base on input variations. The performance of the tracking system when compared with the fixed solar device gave an output of 19.54% increase in voltage output.