4th International Conference on Power Engineering, Energy and Electrical Drives

Istanbul, Turkey, 13-17 May 2013

Design and Implementation of a Renewable Energy

Monitoring System
Ersan KABALCI*,1, Alper GORGUN2, Yasin KABALCI3
*,1

Department of Electrical and Electronics Eng., Engineering and Architecture Faculty, Nevsehir University, Turkey.
Department of Electronics and Automation, Vocational College of Haci Bektas Veli, Nevsehir University, Turkey
3
Department of Electronics and Automation, Nigde Vocational College of Technical Sciences, Nigde University, Turkey.
kabalci@nevsehir.edu.tr, agorgun@nevsehir.edu.tr, yasinkabalci@nigde.edu.tr
2

Abstract This paper introduces an instant monitoring

infrastructure of a renewable energy generation system that is
constituted with a wind turbine and solar panel arrays. There an
uncontrolled six-pulse rectifier converts ac output voltages of
wind turbine to dc. The hybrid system of renewable energy
sources (RES) couples generated voltages of wind turbine and
solar panels on a dc-bus and supplies charge voltage to the
battery bank. The monitoring platform is based on current and
voltage measurements of each renewable source. The related
values are measured with the developed sensing circuits and are
processed by an 18F4450 microcontroller of Microchip. The
processed parameters are then transmitted to a personal
computer (PC) over universal serial bus (USB) to be saved in a
database and to observe the system instantly. The observing
software that is coded with Microsoft Visual Studio.Net platform
allows system administrator to monitor generated energy and
actual status of each renewable energy source at a glance. The
coded visual interface of monitoring software can manage the
saved data to analyze daily, weekly and monthly values of each
measurement separately.
Keywords-hybrid renewable energy; wind turbine; solar panel;
monitoring; microcontroller.

I.

INTRODUCTION

The renewable energy sources (RES) such as wind, solar,

biomass, geothermal, and tidal are believed to tackle the
dependency to fossil fuels in this century. The RES are also
assumed as alternative energy sources and are integrated to
current grid structures by distributed generation (DG) systems.
The island mode applications of RES are being converted to
grid-tied integrations in order to increase the capabilities of
conventional grids [1,2]. The DG based on various energy
sources will allow obtaining higher total energy efficiency and
improved performance. A robust micro grid constituted with
different energy sources should also exhibit an operation
capability similar to plug and play structure. This term means
the integration capability of any additional source connected to
existing DG system without requiring any system
configuration.
There are many ways to integrate different renewable
energy generation sources to form a hybrid system. The
methods can be generally classified into three categories as dccoupled, ac-coupled, and hybrid-coupled [1-3]. The monitoring
and metering requirements in DG networks should be
performed as well as done in conventional networks. Although

978-1-4673-6392-1/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

POWERENG 2013

there are several methods proposed as wired or wireless

measuring, all the solutions are related to smart grid concept
that is extensively researched [5-7]. The demands directed to a
smart grid are remote sensing, communication, control,
monitoring and analysis processes. The smart grid should also
meet these requirements in a sustainable, reliable and efficient
way. The applications and studies on smart grid are mostly
focused on phase measurements, advanced metering and
remote monitoring of a source [7].
The RES system introduced in this study is based on dc-bus
coupling by rectifying the output voltages of wind turbine and
connecting to dc-bus of solar system as shown in Fig. 1. The
monitoring system is developed with sensing and measurement
circuits. The current and voltages of wind turbine and solar
panel array are measured instantly and are processed with a
peripheral interface controller (PIC) of Microchip. The
parameters to be observed are acquired with sensing circuits
that are constituted by current and voltage sensors. The
acquired values are conformed to the involved levels in order
to be processed by microcontroller (MCU). The pre-processed
measurements are then applied to analog-digital conversion
(ADC) ports of the MCU. The key role of the MCU is
performing the connection between personal computer (PC)
and measurement system where monitoring software runs on
the PC to save and analyze the actual conditions of RES. A
bidirectional universal serial bus (USB) connection is managed
by the MCU. The interface software that is coded by using
Microsoft Visual Studio.Net platform provides to save
measured data to a database by generating historical view
options and visualizes saved data on user interface with

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the hybrid energy system.

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graphical presentations. The following paarts of this paper

covers introduction of the RES test-bed, measurement and
monitoring system in second and third parts,, respectively. The
operation analyses and evaluation of the syystem performance
are discussed in fourth section.
II.

THE IMPLEMENTED RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEM

The hybrid RES that is constituted with a wind turbine at 2

kW rated power and a solar panel arrayy are installed at
Vocational College of Haci Bektas Veli as seen
s
in Fig. 2. The
rotor diameter of wind turbine is 3.6 m and hub height is 9 m.
The over speed protection is supplied withh electromechanic
braking and dump load methods. The cut-in speed of turbine is
3 m/s while the cut-off limit is set to 20 m/s.. The wind turbine
generates three-phase ac output voltage arounnd 165 V owing to
its permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG).
The solar energy conversion system iss constituted with
eight mono-crystalline solar panels as seen on
o the upper righthand side of Fig. 2. The solar panels are connnected in serial and
parallel configuration in order to share power
p
capacity in
voltage and current distribution. The generaated power of the
RES is coupled to dc-bus and is used to chaarge batteries. The
battery bank consists of eight serially conneccted 12V/100A gel
batteries. The control and monitoring system
m illustrated in Fig.
1 performs charge control operation of the enntire system. There
sensing and MCU circuits as seen in Figg. 3 implement a
monitoring system.
III.

RING SYSTEM
IMPLEMENTATION OF MONITOR

The software and hardware that are desiggned to acquire the

related measurements of solar and wind power
p
system are
analyzed in this section.

Istanbul, Turkey, 13-17 May 2013

measurement and communicaation circuits require 5V and

12V voltage levels. Fig. 4 illuustrates the supply circuit that is
built with symmetrical voltage regulator
r
circuits.
B. Current and Voltage Acquissition Circuit
The current acquisition circcuit is based on LA55-P current
sensor of LEM that has a convversion ratio at 1/1000 [8]. Since
the measurement values of currrent circuit will be quite low, the
sensitivity of the data that willl be transferred to the MCU is
also expected to be low. Thhere is an active amplifier is
designed to overcome this situation. The current data
acquisition circuit is shown in Fig.
F 5 where the current of solar
panel is obtained with currentt sensor in a dc waveform and
amplified with an operationnal amplifier (op-amp). The
amplified dc waveform is appplied to RA1 pin of the MCU.
Furthermore, a potentiometer and zener diode is used on the
input side of the MCU to
t provide protection against
overshoots. Another current accquisition circuit is designed as
seen in Fig. 6 for wind turbinne and conversion system. The
current of wind turbine is acquuired with current sensor in a dc
waveform as done in solar systtem and is amplified with an opamp to transfer the signal to RA
A3 pin of the MCU.
The overshoot current prottection of wind data acquisition
system is performed with a pootentiometer and a zener diode
that are connected parallel to RA3
R
pin of the MCU as seen on
the right-hand side of Fig. 6. The voltage acquisition circuit
designed for wind turbine convverts the measured value to a dc
waveform and then provides to RA2 pin of the MCU by
amplifying. The zener diode is
i also added to this circuit for
protection issues where the com
mplete circuit is seen in Fig. 7.

A. Supply Circuit
The voltage supply circuit is designed inn order to provide
the required voltages in symmetrical vaalues. The MCU,

Fig. 3. Block diagram

m of the control system.

Fig. 2. Hybrid RES installed at Vocational College of

o Haci Bektas Veli.

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Fig. 4. Schematic diagram

m of voltage supply circuit.

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4th International Conference on Power Engineering, Energy and Electrical Drives

Istanbul, Turkey, 13-17 May 2013

Fig. 5. Current acquisition circuit for solar panels.

Fig. 8. The flowchart of MCU.

Fig. 6. Current acquisition circuit for wind turbine.

Fig. 7. Voltage acquisition circuit for wind turbine.

C. Control Circuit
18F4450 microcontroller is known as USB microcontroller
with nanowatt technology. The PIC18FX455/X550 device
family contains a full-speed and low-speed compatible USB
Serial Interface Engine (SIE) that allows fast communication
between any USB host and the PIC microcontroller. Besides
being compatible to USB2.0 protocol, 18F4450 MCU provides
1.5Mb/s data communication speed in low speed mode and
12Mb/s speed in full speed operation mode. There are 22
separate registers that are named as USB Control register
(UCON), USB Configuration register (UCFG), USB Transfer
Status register (USTAT), USB Device Address register
(UADDR), Frame Number registers (UFRMH:UFRML), and
Endpoint Enable registers (UEPn) are defined to control USB
communications [9]. The control circuit is constituted with an
18F4450 owing to these features and performs the real time
measurement of all hardware besides control operations.

POWERENG 2013

The block diagram seen in Fig. 3 illustrates the control

circuit and its integration to energy conversion system. All the
data sent from measurement and acquisition devices are
evaluated by the MCU. It is observed by experimental studies
that the MCU performs the operation of system parameters in a
fast and reliable way owing to its software developed in C
programming language. The MCU senses its configured ports
continuously and awaits an input waveform to convert to the
data. This sensing property of the MCU is also related with a
PC over USB connection and the MCU operates the command
arrays that are sent from the PC. In case of a command is sent
from PC to MCU, it operates the related sub-procedure and
writes the obtained values to the database. The flowchart of the
MCU is shown in Fig. 8. These operation procedures are
synchronized by control signals that are managed by MCU
with USB port. Each transmission cycle is depended to USB
authorization that enables MCU to send data package
containing four parameters in serial communication standards.
Although the communication speed between USB and MCU
can be increased up to 480 Mbit/s owing to USB 2.0 protocol,
it is limited to 12Mb/s by the full speed oscillator of 18F4450
MCU.
IV.

DEVELOPED MONITORING TOOL

The hardware design of the monitoring system is seen in

Fig.9. The voltage and current measurement board that is
depicted on the left-hand side of Fig.9 is built with LA-55P
current sensors and LV-25P voltage sensors. Attenuating
Circuit decreases the sensed wind turbine voltage and all the
voltage and current values are converted to dc voltage levels
by Measurement and calibration circuit where the output of
this board is supplied to analog-digital conversion (ADC) pins

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4th International Conference on Power Engineering, Energy and Electrical Drives

of the MCU. Although the related values are defined as current

and voltages of solar panels and wind turbine, there are several
measurements such as battery voltage, temperature, charge
values etc. can be done by using the data acquisition card
designed. Therefore, all the ADC ports of 18F4450 MCU are
configured according to USB communication for possible
future measurements. The obtained analog measurement
results are processed in the MCU after digital conversion steps
and the flowchart introduced in Fig. 8 is run on MCU. The
user interface of monitoring tool is shown in Fig.10. The
monitoring tool of the hybrid system is developed with Visual
C#.Net software development kit of .Net Studio. The acquired
values are processed and are transmitted by the MCU to PC

Istanbul, Turkey, 13-17 May 2013

over USB port. The usb control routine of the developed tool
writes the received data to a database (DB) file in each
acquiring interval. The second step of monitoring process is
gathering the related dataset from the DB file. The measured
values are obtained from DB synchronously and are written in
the related textboxes that are located on the lower left-hand
side of user interface. There a calibrating conversion is applied
in interface software that the measured real values are
instantly seen in textboxes.
The instantly measured values are also visualized in
separate line graphs for each parameter where the line graphs
are drawn by adding instant values and connecting line dots

(b)

(a)
Fig. 9. Hardware of the monitoring system; a) general view, b) boards.

Fig. 10. The screenshot of monitoring tool

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4th International Conference on Power Engineering, Energy and Electrical Drives

together. Although the monitoring interface display real time

measurement results on textboxes and current or voltage
graphs, it is also possible to reach DB file to analyze history of
the hybrid RES system.
V.

CONCLUSIONS

In this paper a parameter monitoring tool that is designed to

observe voltage and current values of a hybrid RES system
with real time tracking property is introduced. The energy
generation system is built with a wind turbine and solar panels
arrays where the generated energy is coupled over a dc-bus
and then is supplied to battery pack that consist eight gel
batteries with 12V/100A current and voltage rates. The
monitoring system can be considered in two parts as hardware
and software. The hardware part is built with sensing, voltage
attenuator, measurement and calibration, and MCU control
boards. All the designed boards perform the measurement and
communication operation between hybrid RES and PC in the
mentioned queue. The monitoring interface is coded with
Visual C# of .Net framework. The developed tool manages the
USB communication between 18F4450 MCU and provides
mutual control operation. The measured values are stored in a
permanent database and user interface generates the graphics
by gathering datasets from DB file where each measurement is
stored in a column.
Although the monitoring interface uses real time
measurement results to prepare the current and voltage
graphics, it is also possible to reach DB file to analyze history
of the hybrid RES system. In future studies, it is aimed to
develop the monitoring tool by adding user controls that
provide analysis features by generating daily, weekly or
monthly graphics according to requested selection. The
developed tool can be adapted to a web site owing to
deploying properties of .Net studio
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This study is a part of a scientific research project that is
funded by Scientific Research Division (NEUBAP) of

POWERENG 2013

Istanbul, Turkey, 13-17 May 2013

Nevsehir University with ref. No. 2012/13. Ersan Kabalci

thanks to NEUBAP Division for the support.
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