Research & Development Initiatives

Installation of Thies Sensors and additional equipment in SISMED/RG24
During September 2021, the Thies wind measurement sensors acquired through the PEI project and other components through the PIO-CONICET (24420170100002CO) and the PI 29/A412 were installed, mounting the tower and wiring to the SISMED/RG24 datalogger with Existing Campbell CR1000/NL115. In addition, the link between this datalogger and a centralized Thingsboard dashboard residing on a remote server was carried out. The datalogger takes wind information from the mentioned Thies sensors installed in the same tower as the Eolux wind turbine, as well as current and voltage measurements produced by a set of photovoltaic panels and the wind turbine that charge the wind turbine.  Trojan 24 V / 390 Ah battery bank and supplies through a QMAX 1724SP-C sinusoidal inverter/charger energy to the greenhouse of the UARG Campus (Figures 1 and 2).

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Figure 1 – Thies FC installed (right), Sensor Mount (center) and hub box on tower base (left )

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Figure 2 –  (right) Veleta Thies (photo Javier Ortiz), CR1000 Trials (center), installation team (left-to-right J.Lescano, N. Cortez, J.Ortiz, R.Oliva)

 

In turn, an external auxiliary module was built to measure temperature and humidity inside the greenhouse, communicated by RS485 and Modbus RTU protocol with the main datalogger. This set was installed 09/2021, together with the sensors and the updated version of the SISMED/RG24 (Figure 3, below). This equipment now integrates the existing CR1000/NL115 assembly with a Raspberry Pi 4B (RBPi4) board, via the Modbus/TCP protocol. The RBPi4 converts this protocol to MQTT/TLS to provide data transmission security, since the server with the dashboard is outside the field network. These computers are in an internal NAT network (Figure 3, above, and Figure 4) configured on a Mikrotik Hex-Lite router, which in turn communicates with the Ubiquiti Nano M5 WiFi transceiver installed in 2019. In the previous version of the SISMED/RG24 [Oliva et al., 2020] the CR1000/NL115 was connected directly to the Ubiquiti, and the programmable HTTP microserver of the CR1000 was used, which had very limited capabilities in presentation of results (only HTML-Text and tables ) and security.

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Figure 3 –  (top) General system diagram, and Temp/Humidity module (left, bottom) mounted on  Greenhouse (N. Cortez, R.Oliva)

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Figure 4 –  SISMED/RG24 internal configuration with Router and  RBPi4B added, plus the DIN-RS485 board for Modbus communication to the Temp/Hum module

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Communication with the Thingsboard server was configured in cooperation with OES/UTN FRRo (Esp.Ing.Marcelo Castello) and allows remote viewing of instantaneous data recorded every 10 minutes by the system, in Dashboard format (Figure 5, above) or of time series (Figure 5, below). In Figure 6 the installed system and a video of the equipment operation.

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Figure 5 –   Dashboard (Thingsboard 2.3 platform, CE) of the UNPA/Greenhouse system data and time series  of wind direction and intensity (braked wind turbine), samples every 10 minutes (below)  

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Figure 6 –   Assembled equipment, video of their operation and time series of temperature / humidity of a full day inside the greenhouse (08-10-21)

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References:

[Oliva and others, 2020] Oliva R, Salvador J, Cortez N, Lescano J, Triñanes P, Quiroga J, Flores M, González, JF

"ADVANCES IN GREENHOUSE MEASUREMENT AND CONTROL SYSTEMS USING RENEWABLE ENERGIES IN PERI-URBAN LOCATIONS", III Patagonian Conference on Chemical Engineering and Related Careers - UNPA-UARG (virtual) 11-16-2020

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