The Design Of Sun-Tracking Sensor In High Precision With Automatic Gain Control

Currently the main sources of energy for Human survival and development are fossil fuels such as coal and oil.But with the progress of industry and increasing population,and other non-renewable resources’ reserves such as oil are limited and unevenly distributed all over the world,more and more social problems have come to us.One of the main problem is the pollution of the environment.In order to maintain the harmonious development of human society,Many countries in the world are actively seeking to develop new energy sources to replace non-renewable resources.The most important way is the development and utilization of solar energy.According to the features and characteristics of light intensity of sun.we can design a kind of sun-tracking sensor to control the orientation of the collector surface to make the high-precision tracking position of the sun come true and achieve the purpose of improving the utilization rate of solar energyAfter comparing and analyzing several ways to track the sun’s position and several commonly used sensor’s characteristics,this paper has designed a kind of high-precision sun-tracking sensor with automatic-gain-control.It can collect the sun’s irradiation intensity through the photodiode that distributed in the outer of shading tube,to analyze the weather conditions and determine to enter the working state and track the sun’s position preliminarily.The optical system on the sensor and automatic-gain-control of the SCM’s reference voltage can improve the sensitivity of sun-tracking.If there is an error between collector surface normals and sun incident ray,the SCM will offer the Control signal to the Stepper motor’s drives to adjust the orientation of the collector surface.In this way it can achieve precise suntracking and make the angle of collector surface normals and sun incident ray be zero.At the same time the sensor communicates with the computer through serial ports and show the information about deviation of the sun in the computerThis paper describes the hardware and software design of sun-tracking sensor and the structural design of rotating platform.The hardware design includes the design about the automatic-gain-control of the SCM’s reference voltage,control –circuit of SCM,signal-acquisition –and-amplification circuit,-5V power-circuit design,and the introduction of SCM’s internal serial circuit.The software design includes the install of software,the design of main program,signal-acquisition-and-amplification,automatic-gain-control of the SCM’s reference voltage,the sun-tracking and serial port communication.we verify the sun-tracking performance of the sensor through the rotating platform and demonstrate that the sensor we designed in the paper can work steadily and achive the goal of tracking the position of sun in high precision.