New unusually powered "equatorial mount" tracking for solar panels

[Brian in Victoria BC]

TL;DR

Proof of concept Solar tracking based on a timer, that switches airlift pumps on and off to move floats that rotate one or multiple solar panels.

Ultimately, this idea is about tracking solar cookers for poor countries. And that is partly why I made it so low tech.

It's much easier to demonstrate that it works to move solar panels so my first proof of concept has a solar panel. Equatorial mount is just setting something on an axis that points at the north star. (Technically, an axis that is in line with the earth's axis), pointing your payload at the required target (the sun) and then rotating the payload at 15 degrees per hour. Then over the course of the seasons, you will need to occasionally adjust you "declination angle" up or down by up 23degrees, Once to twice a week around the equinoxes and much less around high summer and low winter.

In my proof of concept, I let it run from 8.45 am (when first direct sun comes over my neighbor house until about 6 pm when the sun goes behind my roof. Then I open a valve and let the water drain back into the lower container. This resets the solar panel ready to go for the next morning. This is proving to be more accurate than I had expected. Of course my proof of concept is pretty flimsy, but even so, a lot more accurate than I had expected.

This picture/diagram shows the outside part of my setup

And this diagram shows the inside portion, I will add another picture to show the inside portion.

Here is the current version of the indoor part in the pipe,

So, anyways, the blue wheel slowly winds up some fishing line to pull up the float. The synchronous motor turns the gearbox of an old fan, that turns the piece that moved the fan from side to side (this is where the blue plastic wheel is attached.

The last thing is the programable switch that turns on and off the circuit the right amount to get the solar panel turning at exactly 15 degrees per hour.

 

[Nik_2213]

Remarkably ingenious...

Sadly, I must ask if you have considered the 'Null Hypothesis' of having some-one manually shift the frame about once an hour ??

 

[Brian in Victoria BC]

Hi, Nic, thankyou. Forget the solar panel for the moment, because it is ultimately meant for solar cooking. For solar cooking, the frame needs to be moved once every 15 to 20 minutes (for the high powered parabolic reflectors that give the best performance).

A big problem preventing people using parabolic dishes is you get momentary blindness if the concentrated light flashes in your eyes so in the 15 or 20 minutes some rays of light will slip out of focus, miss the target and potentially hit people's eyes.

The only parabolic dishes that have been adapted on a large scale are "Scheffler solar kitchens" big reflectors that track similarly to mine (automatically) You "warp" the parabolic dish to change its shape to account for seasonal change in the sun's path. The warping makes these parabolic dishes difficult to make. Mine just swings round its axis to do seasonal adjustment.

Non tracking parabolic dishes have been gifted to areas that have had natural disasters, but they are never used past the disaster. The only areas that they have been used massively, is by the "captive audience" of people in refugee camps. A Dutch guy who ran a refugee camp in Nepal holds the record for the biggest deployment of non tracking solar cookers ever. He noted that deploying them outside this "captive audience" has never been successful. He ran automatic solar cookers too, and they continued to be used after the refugee camp was removed. I have seen him and others on youtube, and my effort is in answer to their calls for low tech tracking.