Engineering Commons^™

Discrete-Position Solar Tracking For Photovoltaic System, Shengnan Hong, Zheng Fu, Richard E. Stamper

Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Research Publications

The purpose of this research is to design a new tracking system for solar panels using the idea of discrete-position tracking. Compared with the traditional fixed solar panel, discrete-position trackers have a higher gain of harvesting solar radiation with smaller misalignment angles. Also, since we are trying to design the a passive tracker with solely mechanical structure to do the kinetics, a discrete-position tracker can decrease the cost of the maintenance to a huge extent in contrast to both one-axis and two-axis continuous tracking systems. The majority of the cost of maintaining a continuous tracker is the motor or hydraulic …