Abstract
D.Phil. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)
Population growth and technology advancements are amongst many factors that have led to the increasing electrical energy capacity demands. Several economic, security and environmental factors form obstacles to the expansion of electrical energy supply. Adding to damage caused to the earth’s ozone layer, the majority of electrical energy infrastructures require long transmission lines for the transmission of power to their respective destinations. There is a recent security concern of copper cable theft. Well-designed standalone PV system can contribute to solving the above-mentioned challenges. The design of PV systems is complex due to variations of its main source, i.e. the sun’s solar irradiance. Various organizations made efforts to assist designers with meteorological data, however they failed to cover every corner of this planet and some of the data is sold at expensive rates. This research’s main objective is to simplify the design of PV systems by using Data Acquisition System (DAS) and cloud computing. Two DAS based tools were designed to aid with collection of solar site analysis and load analysis data. The first of the two DAS based tools collects solar energy power samples by employing four small 1 W, 5 V panels, each elevated by 20 degrees. These solar panels are oriented to point to the four primary compass directions, i.e. North, East, West and South. Four panels enable the capturing of solar energy from all directions whilst identifying the directions, which are producing the highest energy during specific time intervals. The DAS acquired solar energy is saved during every 1 % (10 W/m2) change and this occurs once in every three minutes. This DAS acquired data is later transferred to the cloud for storage and sharing. The second DAS based tool is used to collect load analysis data. This device has a built-in current transformer that detects the current that is drawn by the connected load and step down transformer to detect corresponding voltage changes. Power factor is ignored because this research interest lies within the domestic environment. Energy is calculated every one second and saved as a cumulative sum of 25 Wh increments. The algorithms within the two data collection tools, only add new entries to the records whenever there is a significant change of values, as a result, the number of saved data records is optimized, and ultimately this minimizes cloud storage requirements. Both DAS tools employ the National Instruments (NI) myRIO data acquisition (DAQ) cards to collect and process incoming voltage signals. The DAQ card's...