Design and Implementation of the Dual-Axis Solar Tracking System

The capability of photovoltaic (PV) panel to generate energy approximately follows the intensity of the sunlight on the panel. A dual-axis solar programmable logical controller (PLC) based automatic tracking system and its supervisory and control system was designed and implemented in this paper. The proposed automatic tracking system controls elevation and orientation angles of solar panels such that the panels always maintain perpendicular to the sunlight. The measured variables of our automatic solar tracking system were compared with those of a fixed-angle PV system. The results indicated that the automatic solar tracking system is low-cost, reliable and efficient. As a result of the experiment, the electricity generated by the proposed tracking system has an overall increase of about 8%~25% more than the fix-angle PV system.