Improvement of tracking systems of cylindrical parabolic solar collectors

The human population living on Earth is increasing with an acceleration beyond expectations. Due to the increasing need for energy due to population growth, mankind has started to look for alternative energy sources in addition to the resources used to obtain energy. The problem of energy supply, which is the cornerstone of the problems that make up the majority of military, economic and political activities on the world, threatens all humanity. Until recently, human beings used only fossil (conventional) fuels as energy sources. Oil, coal natural gas and so on. fuels used as energy sources, such as being an alternative to being a source of problems poses many problems. Among these problems are environmental pollution, global warming and climate change due to global warming. Due to environmental pollution due to the use of fossil fuels, many people die due to various diseases. Again, climate change caused by global warming has started to deteriorate the natural life forms seriously, and the habitats of some living species have been destroyed and endangered or extinct. All these events harm our world, which is the common heritage of all humanity, and endanger all living life on it. In this thesis, solar tracking systems which can be applied on the concentrator systems (solar collectors) used to obtain more efficient energy than the sun which is accepted as the biggest energy source in the milky way galaxy are studied. In my study, in order to determine the advantages and disadvantages of solar tracking systems compared to each other, after the mechanical design and manufacture of the four-cell parabolic solar collector, two different controllers were designed to compare the two controllers so that the experiments were made identical to the two systems. In the first of the solar tracking systems, the global coordinates (latitude and longitude angle), date and time information obtained via "GPS", and the mathematical formulas of the solar motion axis geometry were calculated with the "Arduino UNO" microcontroller. In the other solar tracking system, a solar tracking system was designed with the "Fuzzy Logic Controller" prepared in "Matlab / Simulink" environment using "Waijung Blockset" and the "STM32F4 Discovery" microcontroller enabled the cells to follow the sun. As a result of the experiments carried out in all weather conditions (full sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy weather), the water heating power of the cells was compared and it was evaluated according to the experimental results that "Fuzzy Logic Controller" based solar tracking system is advantageous over "GPS" based solar tracking system.