Stability Analysis of Solar Tracking System Through Conventional Controllers

Abstract

Solar energy is considered to be as a renewable energy solution for most of energy crises and environmental pollutions and it is Proportional integral derivatively advancing as an important means of renewable energy resource. The main purpose of a solar tracking system is to track the movement of the sun during the sunshine in order to orientate the solar panel to the maximum radiation in all time. More energy is produced by tracking the solar panel to remain aligned to the sun at a right angle to the rays of light. This thesis describes in detail the design modeling and stability of a solar tracking system through conventional controllers of a prototype for solar tracking system. In this thesis the torque of the servo motor used for a single axis solar tracker as well as the selection criteria of a servomotor used for the tracker is calculated. The effect of the wind (first order), cloud (second order) and rain (third order) as a disturbance on the solar tracker is also considered. Finally the solar tracker and disturbance transfer functions have been developed using experimental data. After the mathematical modeling the control objective is set and different kind of conventional controllers are designed to meet the control objective. Firstly Feedback controller and then feedback plus feed forward controller are implemented to meet the control objective but due to their limitations these controllers were unable to give satisfactory results. So a model based controller is designed which has only one tuning parameter as compared to three tuning parameters of Proportional integral derivative controller. The model based controller gives a satisfactory result.