DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF A TWO AXIS SOLAR MAXIMUM POWER POINT TRACKING USING PIC16F877A MICRCONTROLLER BASED SYSTEM

Today, most of the streetlights in Nigeria use solar energy to operate; however, streets and road within cities of Nigeria experience street black out as night goes by due to minimum power tracking of sunlight during the day time thereby resulting to low or slow charging of backup systems (battery). Consequently, this research focus on the design and implementation of a maximum power tracking using the PIC16F877A microcontroller and dc motors for two dimensional sun tracking under different temperature, humidity and irradiation and extract maximum available power from photovoltaic (PV) panel that would serve as an alternative solution towards solving the issue of street blackout. This paper also covers the designing and construction of the Solar Tracking mechanical structure together with the associated electronic circuits and two DC motors. One DC motors is mounted to control the rotation part, while the second one is to control the tilting part. Four pairs of Light sensors Cadmium sulphide (CdS) were installed for detecting the light source position. The PIC16F877A is programmed using C language in microC PRO for PIC. The sensor values, temperature of the day are transmitted to the PC for monitoring purpose. A working system was finally demonstrated to validate the design.