Georgesworkshop Diy Solar Tracking Heater Motor Drive Explained

this morning I'm going to show you the motor drive of the solar tracking parabolic collector. I will start here in the motor box, you can see we have a 12 volt DC gear motor, terminal strip with a couple of terminals here for the motor a support made up of I don't know what you call this stuff brackets and this spider arrangement for the coupling and also for the changing of the half inch size to the to the output size of the motor i (5/16") Coming down this way we have an arm a channel arm which has a nut in it here I'll show you that in a moment and it pivots on this shaft which is actually the same point as the focal line. I'll talk about the focal line here in a second but essentially what the arm does is mimic the motion of one of the solar collectors. I have done it here in paper just so I can show you here what it look like as it spins round in my little stimulation here and the motor drive arm exactly mimics that rotation of that drive arm here as it swings back and forth 50 degrees I have taken the screws out just take this top off to show you what's in here this one has actually been working outside for five years so you pardon the odd bit of rust here and there -This does work. There's a couple bearings on a shaft here like so. You can see the other one in there and what these do is allow - and a flat washer - these allow as the nut travels back and forth this arm of course is gonna be pushed from side to side so that's the way that goes together. Patch 12 volts to the motor drive now from my variable power supply the motor starts to turn and thus turning the shaft and if we go down here you will see how quickly it is moving extremely slowly In fact, it is going to take about 10 minutes to get from end to end. Now what I have set up here on the bench is a kind of paper simulation to show you the position of two example reflectors here spaced 24 inches or 61 centimeters apart and I'm gonna show you what happens as the motor drive goes from end to end. So here we are entirely at one end, call this EAST and you can see all the arms are hard over to one end at the motor drive itself you can see that the arm is about as far as its gonna go here it actually goes a little further before it crashes into that wooden block there. Here we've gone about as far as we can go with that arm Pardon my paper concept model here but that does work in real physical terms and the other thing you can see starting to happen is if this goes much further this reflector is actually gonna collide with the control rod so we can't go much further than 50 degrees here we are at the other end - call it WEST and you can see the reflectors are healed over all the other way all the way the other way and if we go over and have a look - you'll see that the arm would collide with the screw if we were to go much further we're getting close to the control rod with the reflectors and that's 50 degrees to the side, to the WEST side sound of motor running george mumbling