Design and performance of cylindrical-parabolic solar collectors with different control systems

In this study, the advantages and disadvantages of GPS based and fuzzy logic controller-based solar tracking systems were determined and compared. For comparison, the four-cell cylindrical-parabolic solar collector was designed and tested. Then, half of the cells followed the sun with GPS-based solar tracking system, the other half followed the sun with fuzzy logic-based solar tracking system. In the GPS-based solar tracking system, the global coordinates and date-time information obtained from GPS were calculated using the mathematical formulas of the solar motion axis geometry with the "Arduino UNO" controller, and the cells followed the sun. Fuzzy logic-based solar tracking system was designed by using "Waijung Blocksets" and cells followed the sun with "STM32F4 Discovery" controller. As a result of the experiments, it was observed that solar tracking system using fuzzy logic controller is advantageous compared to GPS-based solar tracking system. Since the system using the fuzzy logic controller moves according to the data it receives from the sensors, it shows less angle error, whereas this error is higher in GPS-based system. According to the experimental results, the error averages of the fuzzy system are 0.659 and 0.415, and the error average of the gps system is 1.278 and 0.876.