A moving solar panel launched by a team of three students was the major attraction of UAE Innovation Week activities organised by Sharjah Media Centre at the Sharjah Expo Centre.
Boosting the need for clean energy, the three final year engineering students of Sustainable and Renewable Energy Engineering at the College of Engineering, University of Sharjah – Hiba Al Najjar, Maather Gornass and Amna Al Hamoudi – introduced the moving solar PV panel that follows the sun to yield maximum energy.
Hiba Al Najjar said: “Our project is unique as it is closest to nature – it moves with the sun. It does not need manual efforts to change direction or an operator to fix the time. The system tracks the sun movement during the day to produce maximum power, increasing efficiency of the device. It can also be connected to a storage device to save the excess power to be used later on.”
She added that usually solar panels are fixed in a certain direction while the sun keeps moving from East to West. Thus those solar panels fail to produce maximum energy. To yield maximum energy, two solar PV panels are used at some locations. Alternatively, solar panels can be moved manually at certain intervals, which is not possible for big projects. At some locations, solar panels have been set to move direction with the time.
The young scientists were confident that their ground breaking project will revolutionise global effort for clean energy as tracking of the sun yields higher performance than fixed PV.