INCREASING EFFICIENCY OF SOLAR PANEL - EXPT. - The Mystique

INCREASING EFFICIENCY OF SOLAR PANEL - EXPT.

3 Comments

A Solar Panel is an excellent source of renewable energy as it converts solar energy to electricity. But there are many factors like dust, change in climate and direction of facing of the panel which decrease its efficiency.

So we have tried to increase the solar panel’s efficiency by making it face sunlight throughout the day so that it can absorb maximum amount of sunlight. That means we tried to rotate the solar panel by 15 degrees every hour.



 


First we carried out the experiment manually by rotating the solar panel every hour and recording the output voltage using multivoltmeter. When compared with the normal readings it was considerably greater! So now we tried to rotate the solar panel on its own by using a Micro controller and by programming it such that it can rotate the motor 30 degrees for every 2 hour interval.

For the “Automatic-rotating” part we used a  “Atmega-8” microcontroller and used AVR studio to program it such that it outputs voltage for 2-seconds every 2 hour interval so that the motor rotates the panel approximately 30 degrees (A stepper motor or a Servo motor will serve the purpose better).
Now the panel faces east in the morning, becomes horizontal at noon, faces west at evening, thus facing the sun almost throughout the day.

From the experiment we recorded the following values


After the experiment the difference between individual values ranged from
5% to 15%
But after taking the average for three days the difference reduced to   6%
So on the whole there was a gain of 6% by rotating a small solar panel.




There are other ideas like wiping out the dust from solar panels every hour automatically or arranging mirrors to increase sunlight radiation on the panel etc. Which you might like to try out !

You might consider watching video of this experiment


Farooq Sk

3 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 25, 2017 at 9:38 PM

    how much dose the solar Pendel cost?

    ReplyDelete
  2. ukahsah15January 17, 2018 at 5:54 PM

    Very useful post. This is my first time i visit here. I found so many interesting stuff in your blog especially its discussion. Really its great article. Keep it up.
    solar panel

    ReplyDelete
  3. mtomSeptember 7, 2018 at 5:42 PM

    Do you have twitter? Great stuff by the way… https://www.xn--strmtest-74a.no/

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)