Solar Power Supply for Sensor Applications in the Field: A Guide for Environmental Scientists

Abstract

The move toward sophisticated sensor networks in ecological applications requires a substantial amount of energy. Energy storage solutions based simply on batteries are often not sufficient to cover the energy needs, so a standalone power supply using solar energy harvesting is generally required. However, designing an appropriate solar power supply without oversizing and avoiding output power disruption all year long is not a trivial task. This paper provides a set of guidelines as well as useful information and advice for environmental researchers and other non-experts to select the right components when designing their own autonomous solar power supply for a range between 10 mW and 10 W. The design steps are compiled into a comprehensive document, free of irrelevant information yet still presenting a general overview of the solar power supply design process, in order to make this task more accessible and understandable for non-experts. The methodology for simple initial dimensioning was carried out and applied to a real-life use case by using the estimated or measured daily consumption combined with free meteorological data of the deployment site provided by various websites. Next, an hourly simulation completed the first sizing. A year of experimental results validated the methodology.