Floating Sun Tracking Solar Panel Model
- Samer Haffar
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
The primary objective of this design project is to design and construct an internet-of-things-based floating sun-tracking solar panel!
Problem Background
The City of Venice, Italy, has recently adopted a new vision to become a more sustainable and environmentally conscious city. This includes taking urgent action to combat climate change and exploring alternative, clean energy sources. One of the most popular and effective sources of sustainable energy is solar energy. Solar energy has several advantages over fossil fuels and other zero-emission energy sources. For one, they are suitable for most areas of the world; all parts of the world receive sunlight, and only in some areas is sunlight ever limited. Additionally, they are very well suited for integration with the current landscape of electricity, including power grids and batteries, and can support a decentralized energy grid. Solar power has plenty of advantages aside from being a completely renewable source of energy but it does have some drawbacks. One major drawback that serves as a barrier to entry is the fact that solar panels require land space. It is common to place solar panels on the roofs of buildings and houses or in large-scale solar farming arrangements, but in order to increase the adoption and integration of solar energy, it must be accessible in a wide range of locations and conditions such as those in Venice.
CAD Assembly
Moving from the theoretical to the practical phase of the design process and according to the items and subdevices available in the market, a lot of adjustments needed to be made on the embodiment design and feedback from the two previous phases was incorporated to meet all the objectives stated in the first phase of the design. The figures below illustrate the final CAD assembly performed on the created parts and a section view to present the electrical components inside the base. The golden colour of the model is the material selected when creating the model, it is a PLA since it is not available on Solidworks, we have manually added with respect to all properties. This is a very important aspect of the Finite Element Analysis that is available later in this report.
Main Components
As mentioned earlier, two servos are used, vertical and horizontal. Horizontal is attached to the rotating base while the vertical is attached to the solar panel holder.
A DHT 11 temperature and humidity sensor was used to collect live data about the temperature and humidity in the base chamber where the components are placed, this will notify the operators in the case of overheat of electronics.
In addition, a water level sensor was placed inside the base to detect any water leakage to the area inside the base and in that case,
RGB LED will turn red to warn of the hazard of water damage or overheating hazard for the other electronic components.
All these components were connected to an Arduino MKR 1010 board.
The Arduino board is connected to the Arduino cloud so it can be monitored and controlled online. Also, all the data collected by the sensors can be shown in the monitoring room in the Arduino cloud in addition to the solar power input.
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