A low consuming power solar heat collection tracker for solar thermal applications

An electromechanical, two axes heat collection sun tracking system is designed and constructed. The heat collection sun tracking design, whereby the LDR sensor installed on the Fersnel lens was controlled to track the Sun's radiation. In order to obtain the maximum sun power, the tracking system traces the sun with the altitude-azimuth biaxial tracing method and accurately maintains the sun's radiation perpendicular to the plane of the heating head. The results indicated that if the position of heating head is located on certain position and then sunlight can be concentrated to completely cover the heating head with small heat loss, we can obtain the maximum temperature of the heating head of the Stirling engine. Besides, we also measure the sun irradiation, energy gain from solar cells, energy consumption, and temperature of heading head. We found that the absorption of solar irradiation on heating head is the most important factor for energy gain from solar tracker and the highest temperature of heating head of Stirling engine.