Smart solar water heating solution uses IoT and AI technologies to improve the efficiency of passive solar water heating system. This solution has been developed to take part in the Open IoT Challenge 4.0!
Passive solar water heating systems are typically less expensive than active systems, but they're usually not as efficient. However, passive systems can be more reliable and may last longer.
The solar panels heat the water in the storage tank when they are affected by the sun rays. The water reaches the highest temperature when the sun is stronger. If the water in the solar panel is hot the divert valve close the flow towards the boiler so the boiler turn off. There are two factors that reduce the system efficiency: boiler distance and thermal dispersion.
The sources of the project are available on GitHub: https://github.com/brusdev/smart-solar-heating-system/tree/master/sensor
The sources of the project of the sensor are at following link: https://github.com/brusdev/smart-solar-heating-system/tree/master/gateway
The sources of the project of the sensor are at following link: https://github.com/brusdev/smart-solar-heating-system/tree/master/server
Solar water heating
Solar water heating (SWH) is the conversion of sunlight into heat for water heating using a solar thermal collector. Solar water heating systems include storage tanks and solar collectors. There are two types of solar water heating systems: active, which have circulating pumps and controls, and passive, which don't.Passive solar water heating systems are typically less expensive than active systems, but they're usually not as efficient. However, passive systems can be more reliable and may last longer.
The solar panels heat the water in the storage tank when they are affected by the sun rays. The water reaches the highest temperature when the sun is stronger. If the water in the solar panel is hot the divert valve close the flow towards the boiler so the boiler turn off. There are two factors that reduce the system efficiency: boiler distance and thermal dispersion.
Boiler distance
Often the boiler lights up, when users open the hot water valve, because the water in the pipe is too cold. If the water in the solar panel is hot and the water in the pipe is cold, the boiler lights up. The lighting up time is proportional to distance between boiler and solar panel because the divert valve close the flow towards the boiler as soon as the hot water arrives. In this case the boiler waste the energy consumed because the lighting up time isn't enough to heat up the water.Thermal dispersion
When it is cloudy or it is night the solar panels don't heat the water in the storage tank, so the thermal dispersion reduces the temperature of the water. If the water isn't used when it is hot the efficiency of the system is reduced.Improve the efficiency
Smart solar water heating solution uses a temperature sensor to power off the boiler when the water is heat enough. This avoids the power on of the boiler for the cold water in the pipe. Furthermore the solution uses a gateway to send this data to a server using artificial intelligence to make a forecast for hot water availability, combining this data with weather forecast. This allows the user to know with advances the hot water availability so he can schedule the use of hot water minimizing the thermal dispersion.Technologies
The temperature sensor is based on a ESP8266 with a thermal probe that uses Eclipse Wakaama to implement LWM2M protocol. The gateway is based on a Raspberry Pi that uses Eclipse Kura for building the IoT gateway, Eclipse Californium and Eclipse Leshan to implement LWM2M and Eclipse Paho to implement MQTT. The server uses Red Hat OpenShift to host the container that runs EnMasse and Apache Spark to analyzing the data to make a forecast for hot water availability.
Sensor
The sensor uses an ESP8266 board with the protocol Lightweight M2M to communicate the temperature read by DS18B20 to the gateway. You can find the details of sensor development here: http://dev.bruscino.eu/2017/12/iot-temperature-sensor-with-esp8266.html
The sources of the project are available on GitHub: https://github.com/brusdev/smart-solar-heating-system/tree/master/sensor
Gateway
The gateway uses a Raspberry Pi with Eclipse Kura to run the application that controls the relay board, Eclipse Leshan to communicate with the sensor, and Eclipse Paho to communicate with the server. You can find the details of gateway devlopement here: http://dev.bruscino.eu/2018/01/iot-gateway-with-raspberry-pi-using.html
The sources of the project of the sensor are at following link: https://github.com/brusdev/smart-solar-heating-system/tree/master/gateway
Server
The server uses a computer with OpenShift to deploy EnMasse and Apache Spark. You can find the details of server development here: http://dev.bruscino.eu/2018/02/iot-cloud-platform-with-enmasse-and.html
The sources of the project of the sensor are at following link: https://github.com/brusdev/smart-solar-heating-system/tree/master/server
Great post! In modern industry, productivity, quality, reliability, and safety heavily depend on the performance of the sensors employed. Yeah, with DS18B20 Temperature Sensor you can measure the temperature of the air, liquids like water and the temperature of the ground. Moreover, It is capable of reading temperatures within 0.05°C.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, this is a well constructed and highly relevant blog of IoT(internet of things). We also have the platform for remote temperature monitoring via internet, WS1 & WS1Pro are the best wireless temperature monitoring sensors.
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