School uses Ravica sensorprobes to measure green energy
We just received a call from a community college in the Mid West. They wanted to purchase four AC Voltage Detectors to integrate into their solar and wind power project. Since I am big on alternative energy and the application of technology to measure it, I jumped on this call right away.
The energy project is a collaboration between the Engineering and Information Technology programs of the college and funded by a local community grant. The goal of the project was to help middle school students build two unique energy sources using the power, and in the end, collect data for reporting. Each energy segment needs to be monitored separately. The first segment was going to be wind and the second would be solar.
The solar side would consist of two collectors and one battery storage unit. Each one of these collectors would have a sensorprobe (the storage unit would have a sensor probe and a digital voltmeter). This would allow the team to record how much energy the cells produced, at any given time. We would also be able to tell the combined energy sent to the storage unit and, at the same time, tell how much energy is in the storage unit.
The wind side would have a similar setup. Each turbine would have a sensor. This would tell us how much energy the turbine was producing. Adding the digital voltmeter to the main feed of the storage unit would tell us combined energy production. The AC Voltage Detector would tell us the state of the wind turbines at any time. What makes the wind side of the project different is that the turbine can produce energy any time.
In both of these cases, the students would have to construct the power units from general industry parts. They couldn’t buy an off the self solution. One of the reasons they decided to go with the Ravica line of sensorprobes for data collection was due to the fact that the probes were totally independent of the energy production system. Setting alarms gives you the added feature of being able to monitor the entire system. This is what they needed to meet the needs of the project, not to mention it helped them come in under budget.
On the data side of things, the team would compile the data from each sensor and reference hourly data from gathered the NOAA weather data. They would then take all of this data and feed it to a community web portal. In the end, they would be able to see how much energy each unit was able to produce at any time. They would all be able to see how weather played in each of the individual units production, and if the entire system compensates for any loss per unit.
I am going to keep this project on my radar. It’s exciting to see these kids having fun and exploring alternitive forms of energy.
- JimmyD
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