Bio-sun tracker engineering self-driven by thermo-mechanical actuator for photovoltaic solar systems

Abstract

Solar trackers increase energy production by adjusting the collector to the optimum angle relative to the sun. Nevertheless, these devices are still fronting several challenges that limit their performance, which affects their use, such as the bad atmosphere impact, the components multiplicity, the complexity of programming and repairing. The provision of integrated solar trackers that completes the system, self-driven to face the sun, ensures stability against bad weather and easeful use that can be a step forward, which increases their use and improves the production of green energy. In this study, an integrated solar tracker has been proposed that based on the shape memory alloys (SMA). These materials can act as a thermo-mechanical actuator that memorizes two shape, one at high temperature the second at low temperature. The exposure of solar radiation raises the actuator temperature. According to degree of temperature, the actuator controls the angle of inclination with which the collector moves to face the sun. Then, a mathematical modelling has been carried out to optimally adapt the proposed actuator with the solar system. In order to validate the numerical study, a comparative study has been conducted to compare the concordance of the simulation results with literature. The proposed solar system that integrated the thermo-mechanical tracker shows an increase of energy production about 39% compared to a fixed system.

Keywords

• Sun tracker
• Shape memory alloys
• SMA
• Actuator
• Solar collector
• PV system