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  • Solar Tracker Platform Development for Energy Efficiency Improvement of Photovoltaic Panels
    1-6.
    Views:
    162

    Solar energy systems have emerged over the last decades as the cleanest and most abundant renewable energy resources available worldwide. Solar trackers are devices specially developed to enhance the energy efficiency of solar energy systems. This paper presents the design and implementation stages of a reconfigurable hardware technology-based two-axis solar tracker platform, specially conceived to improve the energy efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) panels. The main module of this platform is the NI-MyRIO ready-to-use development system built upon a high-performance Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) processor that controls the entire solar tracker unit. Optimal tracking of the sun movement and obtaining the maximal energy efficiency rate is achieved by simultaneous real-time controlling both the captured sunlight intensity and PV cell temperature magnitudes. In this way, a robust and versatile positioning system has been developed that performs a high precision and accurate tracking pathway. All the control algorithms are implemented there under the LabView graphical programming software toolkit. The final solution boosts in a useful and modularized tracking system that looks useful in a wide range of applications both in industrial and domestic project sites with different power scales.

  • Reconfigurable Hardware Technology Application in Buildings Supervising and Monitoring Systems
    1-6.
    Views:
    109

    Due to the continuously increasing demand for more comfortable residential or commercial buildings in the last decades the researches in the so called “intelligent buildings” topic has emerged as one of the most challenging and high ranked engineering task. Consumers also require a higher level of security, supervision, and control of the buildings according to a large scale of user needs. These expectations face building automation and supervising system developers with a challenging problem, difficult to approach with classical methods or strategies. Therefore, this paper is focused to outline novel facilities and solutions offered by the current level microelectronic technologies in building automation. In the first step of this endeavor the benefits and advantages of the reconfigurable hardware systems is highlighted and outlined. Then a concrete building automation and supervising system implementation in hardware reconfigurable technology is presented and detailed. The main unit of this system has been built upon a Genesys Virtex-5 FPGA-based development board, as a high speed, parallel, and distributed computing reconfigurable unit. The software modules for building supervising and monitoring purposes embed last generation MicroBlaze technology which allows fast and convenient implementation of sophisticated control algorithms. The result of the entire development is a powerful and versatile system representing a well suitable solution for the most sophisticated and demanding customer needs in building supervising and monitoring applications.

  • Intelligent Buildings as Cyber-Physical Systems: a Reconfigurable Hardware Technology-based Approach
    1-7.
    Views:
    219

    This paper discusses the idea to change the way to approach intelligent buildings (IBs) development and implementation by taking into account the last evolutions in cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Therefore, the main goal is to extend IBs design engineering with the constraints of systems in a CPS context. As well known, smart buildings are increasingly complex as they integrate many scientific areas and research topics, as well as a large scale of last-generation technologies. At the same time, the Internet has deeply transformed the way to manage information and services, respectively how information is transmitted and computed in cyberspace. The quick management and information processing inside cyber layer challenges the interaction with the physical world in a sense to develop IBs as smart distributed systems or CPSs. In addition to this, the papers emphasize the original idea of developing reconfigurable hardware technology-based (RHT-based) CPS architectures for IBs implementation purposes. The benefits of the RHT application in a CPS context for IBs are widely discussed and analyzed. The unfolded theoretical background has been supported by an implementation example using last generation software technologies. These experiments evidence the advantages and versatility of this challenging implementation paradigm of the latest digital technology, applied for current-state IBs development.

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