DEVELOPMENT OF SMART SOLAR SYSTEM

Under the guidance of

Dr. E. Chandirasekaran

Energy crisis is a prominent topic which is being discussed among people of all
sorts of life and also by all the countries around the globe. Even our country India, faces a
severe energy demand and shortage which requires the immediate attention. SO, people
have started to switch from the polluting non-renewable energy resources to green
renewable energy sources. One of the prominent renewable sources is SOLAR ENERGY.
In country like India, solar energy is available for around 300 days. So, tapping this energy
and harnessing energy from them will be more useful and will be a long term one.
The main objective of this project is to track the sun light manually and to boost the
output obtained from it to a constant voltage based on the MPPT (maximum power point
tracking) so that irrespective of the variation in the sun light intensity the output is obtained
continuously and can be used for our appliances directly or can be used for charging the
battery.
The project uses solar panel of 12 W rating which has an open circuit voltage of
21V and short circuit current of 1.1 A and maximum output voltage of 17.4 V. The output
of this solar panel is given to a DC to DC booster circuit comprising of high frequency
switching MOSFET. The gate pulses for the switching device is given from PIC
microcontroller PIC 16F877A. Major specialty of this controller is PWM output which is
given as gate pulses. The ADC port of the controller is used to input the analog input value
of the solar panel output and the digitized output are used to vary the duty cycle of the
PWM signal to be fed as gate signals. The variation is the PWM is based on the MPPT
concept of tracking the maximum power.
The major advantages of the project is that by using the maximum power point
tracking the output obtained ensures that maximum energy is transferred from the solar
panel to the output and also to adjust the panel to face the sun light of maximum intensity
so that maximum amount of sun light is captured for conversion. By implementing this
concept throughout the Nation, the energy crisis problem prevailing can be reduced and
the Nation will move towards a green one.