High-Resolution Temporal Solar Irradiance Measurement

• Main Author: Cheah, Kai Yuen
• Format: Final Year Project / Dissertation / Thesis
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://eprints.utar.edu.my/4037/1/3E_1603770_FYP_report_%2D_KAI_YUEN_CHEAH.pdf; http://eprints.utar.edu.my/4037/

Nowadays, electricity had become an important part in our daily life. Electricity that we used currently is mostly generated by combustion of fossil fuel. These fossil fuels are non-renewable and will pollute the environment during combustion to generate electricity. Thus, scientists are focusing on harvesting renewable energy such as solar, wind and tides energy in order to replace the non-renewable energy and at the same time reduce air pollution. In Malaysia, solar PV panel is most suitable to be installed to harvest solar energy since it is located near the equator and has tropical weather. A high-resolution temporal solar irradiance measurement is needed to study the intermittency of solar power as it has a higher sampling rate. Intermittency is defined as the unavailability of renewable energy power source in a certain period of time. Low resolution measurement system may overlook the intermittency. In this paper, a 10 seconds resolution solar irradiance measurement system is built and the collected data is automatically uploaded to the cloud for storage. The results obtained from the sensor in 10 seconds basis were compared with the minute basis results from the pyranometer. Other than that, another two circuits with the same configuration are also built and calibration had been made for each system. These three systems are used to study about intermittency in the future. Besides that, the data which is collected in 15 days from 19 March 2020 to 2 April 2020 is analysed. Standard deviation and maximum difference between points for 10seconds, 20 seconds, 30seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes and 5 minutes measurement time resolution are calculated and plotted.