Preliminary Results on Design and Implementation of a Solar Radiation Monitoring System

• Main Authors: Lorentz Jäntschi, Mihai Damian, Mugur C. Balan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2008-02-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: Solar Radiation Monitoring; Data Acquisition Software; Solar Energy Potential; Systems Design and Implementation.
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/8/2/963/

The paper presents a solar radiation monitoring system, using two scientificpyranometers and an on-line computer home-made data acquisition system. The firstpyranometer measures the global solar radiation and the other one, which is shaded,measure the diffuse radiation. The values of total and diffuse solar radiation arecontinuously stored into a database on a server. Original software was created for dataacquisition and interrogation of the created system. The server application acquires the datafrom pyranometers and stores it into a database with a baud rate of one record at 50seconds. The client-server application queries the database and provides descriptivestatistics. A web interface allow to any user to define the including criteria and to obtainthe results. In terms of results, the system is able to provide direct, diffuse and totalradiation intensities as time series. Our client-server application computes also derivateheats. The ability of the system to evaluate the local solar energy potential is highlighted.