Abstract
This paper presents a compact low-cost weather station specially dedicated to renewable energy applications based on solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies. The main objective of the weather station is to verify which technology of solar PV modules would be more suitable for the specific location where the weather station is installed. Therefore, the developed weather station includes three technologies of PV modules (polycrystalline, monocrystalline, and amorphous silicon), each one connected to a dedicated DC-DC power converter with a maximum power point control (MPPC) functionality, as well as a set of sensors (solar irradiance, temperature, humidity, wind speed, and wind direction) used to measure the local weather. The acquired data is processed and stored locally in the weather station and, when necessary, the user can download the data to an Android mobile device through a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless network connection using the developed mobile app, where the transferred data is stored in a SQLite database and can be visualized in graphs. Throughout the paper, the design of the developed weather station and the associated technologies are described, as well as the details of the mobile app. The developed system comprising the weather station and the mobile app was validated through a set of experimental tests ranging from the data acquisition to its visualization, as well as the achieved wireless data transfer performance.
Highlights
As the world population increases, the demand for energy grows with it, where fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas still supply 80% of the total energy demand
A 40o inclination in relation to the vertical axis was used for the photovoltaic modules, which is the recommended value in the location where the weather station was placed for the month when it was tested
This paper presents the development of a weather station dedicated to renewable energy applications, which includes a mobile app that provides a user interface and allows data transfer, storage and visualization
Summary
As the world population increases, the demand for energy grows with it, where fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas still supply 80% of the total energy demand. Photovoltaics is one of the methods to convert solar energy into electricity, and this technology has had a significantly improvement in the last years in terms of efficiency and cost reduction. It is based on semiconductor materials that exhibit the PV (Photovoltaic) effect to convert the sunlight into electrical energy. These semiconductors are mainly made of silicon, which has a large availability in the Earth’s crust. In terms of environmental effects, PV generates no pollution neither greenhouse gas emissions. It provides great scalability, meaning that its applications can range from a few mW to hundreds of MW. Despite a lower efficiency when comparing to crystalline technologies, it has the advantage of being flexible, which can be useful in some applications [7]
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