Sistema Informático Para el Uso Remoto de un Laboratorio de Energía Renovable

Abstract

The main objective of this degree project is to develop a web application that allows students of the School of Electronic Engineering of the Universidad Santo Tomás to remotely access the “Development Kit Energy Harvesting” to perform laboratory practices. This kit includes several power generators, a photovoltaic cell, a thermoelectric generator and a piezoelectric generator. For the proposed remote laboratory, only the photovoltaic cell will be used; therefore, a laboratory guide entitled “Determination of the I-V characteristic curve of a photovoltaic cell with experimental data” was designed, which describes the operation of the implemented hardware and offers a step-by-step guide to perform the experiment through the web application. Subsequently, the necessary hardware is developed, consisting of a photovoltaic cell, a system to vary the irradiance on the cell, a first order circuit that allows emulating the behavior of a variable load connected to the renewable energy generation unit and a microcontroller, which is responsible for collecting the data and sending them through its WiFi functions to the web application. The web application is in charge of displaying the information obtained from the photovoltaic cell in real time, visualizing the data through graphs or tables, and also allows to control parameters related to the laboratory such as the irradiance emitted to the photovoltaic cell and the charge or discharge of the capacitor of the first order circuit. The results show that the developed computer system allows users to receive information in real time, visualize the data through graphs or tables, and control parameters such as irradiance and the charge or discharge of the capacitor in the first order circuit.