A PV solar tracking system: Design, implementation and algorithm evaluation

Electrical energy is considered to be the soul of modern civilization. Traditional electrical energy generation approaches which usually rely on oil and its derivatives, produce different kinds of pollution in addition to being expensive to implement and maintain. And most important, they are exhaustible on the long run. Jordan is a country with very limited natural resources and the energy bill exhausts a large amount of its GDP. Solar energy is a promising renewable energy resource that could solve many of the country´s problems if well utilized specially that the majority of days in Jordan are sunny. One method to utilize harvested solar energy is through using tracking algorithms. In this research, a PV solar tracking test-bed is designed and implemented. The test-bed is used to evaluate different solar tracking algorithms. Then we propose a modified tracking algorithm that was able to increase the harvested energy by 4% on sunny days and 10% on cloudy and rainy days when compared to other evaluated algorithms.