05-07-2012, 03:11 PM
A LabView Based Instrumentation System for a Wind-Solar
Hybrid Power Station
wind solar.pdf (Size: 419.2 KB / Downloads: 205)
Introduction
At the simplest level, data acquisition
can be accomplished manually using
paper and pencil, recording readings
from a multimeter or any other instrument.
For some applications this form
of data acquisition may be adequate.
However, data recording applications
that require large number of data
readings where very frequent recordings
are necessary must include
instruments or microcontrollers to
acquire and record data precisely
(Rigby and Dalby, 1995). Laboratory
Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench
(LabView™) is a powerful and
flexible instrumentation and analysis
software application tool which was
developed in 1986 by the National
Instruments (National Instruments,
2002). LabView™ has become a vital
tool in today’s emerging technologies
and widely adopted throughout
academia, industry, and government
laboratories as the standard for data
acquisition, instrument control and
analysis software.
Literature Review
The literature on fundamentals and
applications of data acquisition,
instrumentation, and control to engineering
and technology is very extensive.
Today in any type of computer
aided manufacturing project work and
laboratory tests, precision and reliability
of instrumentation and data acquisition
techniques may cause major
impacts on results and outcomes.
Therefore, students in technology
programs must gain knowledge and
skills pertinent to their curriculum and
job requirements when they need to
obtain any type of physical or virtual
data on manufacturing, testing, measurement,
and protection areas. An
overview and importance of data
acquisition and automation in general
are listed well in the literature (Curtis,
2003, and Wolf, Smith, 1990).
Cost Analysis of the Power and Instrumentation System
Table 1 illustrates detailed parts list and
costs for the overall power system and
its instrumentation excluding existing
one PC and variety of other ac loads.
UNI Department of Industrial Technology,
College of Natural Sciences
Annual student research grants
(SOAR), and UNI Center for Environ-
Figure 6. Front panel of the data acquisition virtual instrument.
Figure 7. Pdc and Pac waveforms for a 10 min time period.
Figure 8. Wind speed wspeed (in mph) monitoring for a 10 min time period.ment and Energy Education (CEEE)
are sponsors of this project. The major
cost of the instrumentation is the
software for the LabView™ professional
development system for Windows
98/NT as appears in Table 1.
Addition of more stations to the system
will only require LabView™Student
Edition which costs $50 per copy.