IoT real time system for monitoring lithium-ion battery long-term operation in microgrids

Abstract

Energy storage through Lithium-ion Batteries (LiBs) is acquiring growing presence both in commercially available equipment and research activities. Smart power grids, e.g. smart grids and microgrids, also take advantage of LiBs to deal with the intermittency of renewable energy sources and to provide stable voltage. In this context, monitoring and data acquisition tasks are required for the proper operation and continuous surveillance and tracking of the LiB. In this paper, a monitoring system devoted to visualizing the operation of a LiB is presented. Internet of Things (IoT) technology is used to deploy the system, namely, Grafana software is applied for data analytics and visualization, being hosted in a microcomputer Raspberry Pi. The user is able to access online to graphical and numerical real time information about the LiB magnitudes (current, voltage, temperature, state of charge, etc.). Such a LiB acts as the backbone of a microgrid which hybridizes photovoltaic power with hydrogen generation and consumption. The proposal is a novelty in scientific literature since it overcomes limitations identified in previous works such as absence of long-term operation, of medium-scale power/capacity, of alerts for safe range of critical magnitudes, of real operating conditions, and of compatibility/interoperability management. The design and implementation of the monitoring system is reported together with experimental data of the LiB to prove its feasibility and successful performance.