Design and implementation of a renewable energy monitoring system

Abstract

This paper introduces an instant monitoring infrastructure of a renewable energy generation system that is constituted with a wind turbine and solar panel arrays. There an uncontrolled six-pulse rectifier converts ac output voltages of wind turbine to dc. The hybrid system of renewable energy sources (RES) couples generated voltages of wind turbine and solar panels on a dc-bus and supplies charge voltage to the battery bank. The monitoring platform is based on current and voltage measurements of each renewable source. The related values are measured with the developed sensing circuits and are processed by an 18F4450 microcontroller of Microchip. The processed parameters are then transmitted to a personal computer (PC) over universal serial bus (USB) to be saved in a database and to observe the system instantly. The observing software that is coded with Microsoft Visual Studio. Net platform allows system administrator to monitor generated energy and actual status of each renewable energy source at a glance. The coded visual interface of monitoring software can manage the saved data to analyze daily, weekly and monthly values of each measurement separately.