Design and Implementation of an Automatic Single Axis Tracking with Water-Cooling System to Improve the Performance of Solar Photovoltaic Panel

As an alternative source of energy people all over the world have started using renewable energy. Renewable energy are unlimited sources of energy and they are completely free of cost. The most popular renewable energy sources are solar energy, wind energy, tidal energy, geothermal energy, hydro energy, biomass energy. Among the renewable energy sources, solar energy is the cleanest source of energy. Solar photovoltaic panel absorbs solar energy and produces electricity. The output of a solar photovoltaic panel depends on some factors such as sunlight intensity, solar panel surface temperature, solar cell materials, and shade and so on. To make sure that solar panel absorbs maximum irradiance from sun a tracking system is required which help the panel move towards the sun in day time according to sun light. In addition to control the surface temperature of solar photovoltaic panel, a microcontroller based automatic cooling system is designed. When the surface temperature of the panel is above the optimum temperature then the output of the solar panel is decreasing, to control the surface temperature an automatic cooling system will start and decrease the surface temperature of the solar panel consequence the performance is increasing. The main purpose of this work is to design and implement a microcontroller based automatic single axis solar tracking system with an automatic water-cooling system. These systems increase the output of the solar panel as well as rise the efficiency of the solar photovoltaic panel.