Active Solar Tracker Based on the Horizon Coordinate System

Abstract

One of the disadvantage of solar panel as a renewable energy is lack of power output when the solar panel is not directly leading to the sun. To increase the output power of solar panel, an active solar tracker based on the horizon coordinate system of solar has been developed. The solar horizon coordinate system used to determine the position of the sun at every single time, thus the solar panel's position to the sun is more precise. This device consists of arduinouno as control system, two servo motors as a panel drive, a PLX-DAQ program as a data monitoring, ACS - 712 as the current sensor, and a DC voltage sensor as the output voltage sensor. Sensor characterization shows that ACS-712 measures current in mA orde and has a maximum relative error of 4.25%, meanwhile the voltage sensor detects the output voltage up to 15 Volt and has the maximum relative error of 4.34%. The output power of this device increases 83,89% to the other active solar panels. To determine the effect of altitude and azimuth data, measurements were carried out in two different cities, there are Bekasi city and Tangerang city. The results show that the output power in both cities differed by 77.7%.