Low Cost Solar Tracker Using Gearbox and Timer Circuit

ABSTRACT: Solar technology has great potential in terms of supplying the world's energy demands. The effective way of using sunlight with solar energy concentration technology and solar tracking system is discussed in this paper. The present status of application and the ongoing research and development work suggest that parabolic dish solar concentrators coupled with solar trackers will bring a breakthrough of commercial solar energy concentration application technology in the coming years. The paper is focused on increasing the efficiency of parabolic dish concentrator using solar tracker. This paper will provide an up-to-date review of solar parabolic dish concentrators and their benefits to make solar technology affordable. . KEYWORDS: Solar tracker, Parabolic dish. I. INTRODUCTION Solar energy is a dilute form of energy, but the amount of solar energy that is incident on earth's surface is capable of solving our energy demands. It is thus required to utilize maximum energy incident on earth. Parabolic trough is a device which concentrates sun's rays at its focal point, it is possible for it to concentrate the rays towards its focal point due to the geometric properties, but it can only happen when the sun's rays are perpendicular to the surface of the concentrator. As the earth rotates the position of sun changes according to the time and this changes the focal point position. To overcome this problem it is necessary to track the path of the sun which will continuously keep the concentrator perpendicular to sun's rays. The sunlight incidence angle constantly varies, not only during the daytime, but it also changes drastically during the different seasons of the year. Moving the concentrator in order to track the sun can significantly improve the energy output. Tracking sun will help keeping the focal point at the same position due to which the temperature obtained will me maximum and the efficiency of the unit will increase. Also it has to be taken into consideration that the amount of energy the tracker will utilize to track the sun should be minimum, otherwise it will be of no use if the tracker utilizes more energy than the increased energy in concentrator. Another point which has an impact is the cost consideration, already the solar equipment are costlier compared to devices working on conventional sources. Hence the tracker system which is an additional unit should not cost much. In this paper we have focused on developing a solar tracker which will have less initial cost also it will have very less running cost compared to the trackers that are available. In this paper we have designed solar tracker for parabolic dish which can be used for process heating, thus with the use of this solar tracker we can have a fully automated unit which will require no human operator to change the concentrator position according to the position of the sun