MOTHER’s Super-Simple Solar Tracker

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FIG. 4: The collector has been facing west (left). As the sun appears on the eastern horizon (to the right), however, the freon in its unshaded tank has begun to warm and expand. This is pushing the piston down in the hydraulic cylinder and, as the contracting piston pulls on the eccentric arm fastened to the pivoted flat-plate collector, the solar collector is pulled over to face the fresh morning sun.
FIG. 4: The collector has been facing west (left). As the sun appears on the eastern horizon (to the right), however, the freon in its unshaded tank has begun to warm and expand. This is pushing the piston down in the hydraulic cylinder and, as the contracting piston pulls on the eccentric arm fastened to the pivoted flat-plate collector, the solar collector is pulled over to face the fresh morning sun.
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FIG. 3-A: The sun's rays warm right tank but not the left one. FIG. 3-B: As pressure builds in right tank, liquid freon is forced into left one and collector tilts in that direction. FIG. 3-C: As the collector turns more and more directly toward the sun, its left tank also begins to heat. As pressure builds in that container, it begins to accept less and less liquid freon from the right tank. Equilibrium Is achieved when the two containers are equally exposed to the sun. The system, in short, wants to automatically
FIG. 3-A: The sun's rays warm right tank but not the left one. FIG. 3-B: As pressure builds in right tank, liquid freon is forced into left one and collector tilts in that direction. FIG. 3-C: As the collector turns more and more directly toward the sun, its left tank also begins to heat. As pressure builds in that container, it begins to accept less and less liquid freon from the right tank. Equilibrium Is achieved when the two containers are equally exposed to the sun. The system, in short, wants to automatically "lock onto" the sun and track it all day long.

MOTHER’s Dennis Burkholder develops a $34.49 solar tracker that works better than some $200 units we’ve seen!

Make a Simple, Low-Cost Solar Tracker

See the Image Gallery for the diagrams of the solar tracker.

Anybody who’s ever played around with solar energy (and that includes a lot of us these days) usually devotes a great deal of his or her early experiments to the fabrication and testing of flat-plate, parabolic, and other collectors of the sun’s rays. And, sooner or later, he or she begins to think about how much more efficient (about 40% more) most of those collectors would be . . . if they only had some sort of mechanism built into them to keep them pointed directly at the sun all day long as it travels across the sky.

Now, there are a lot of solar tracking devices floating around at the present time . . . based on everything from wind-’em-up clockwork mechanisms to silicon cells to bimetallic gizmos of one sort or another. The only trouble is that all these gadgets are either expensive, or complex, or must be recalibrated frequently, or require an outside source of power with constant frequency and voltage and a separate feedback path to correct their errors . . . or some combination of the above.

  • Published on Nov 1, 1977
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