100W Solar Tracker with Arduino MKR1000 (Preliminary Results)

Solar tracking systems have proven to be an effective technique for improving the performance of solar panels by keeping them aligned with the incident light source for most of the day. The main objective of this project is to carry out a quantitative analysis to evaluate the performance improvement of a 100 W polycrystalline solar panel equipped with a 1-axis horizontal solar tracking system (which we call ”100 W solar tracker”), compared to a panel with the same characteristics that remains fixed. An Arduino MKR1000 is used to control the movement of the solar tracker and collect data from both solar panels, which is stored on a microSD card and uploaded to a MySQL database via WiFi connection. The solar tracker was developed at the ”Centro de Investigación con Técnicas Nucleares (CITEN)” and is in operation at the ”Estación Meteorológica Colina” of the University of Panama. The results of this study reveal a clear increase in the maximum instantaneous power of the solar tracker compared to the fixed panel. Demonstrating that the implementation of a tracking system significantly improves the performance of a solar panel.