Development of solar cells for IoT applications
With the Internet of Things (IoT) rapidly expanding and gaining attention, it is expected that billions of objects will be connected to it in the future. Deployment of the wireless sensor nodes (WSN) is required with the development IoT. With IoTWSN essentially having to be energy autonomous, phot...
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| Format: | Final Year Project |
| Language: | English |
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Nanyang Technological University
2020
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/140281 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | With the Internet of Things (IoT) rapidly expanding and gaining attention, it is
expected that billions of objects will be connected to it in the future. Deployment of
the wireless sensor nodes (WSN) is required with the development IoT. With IoTWSN essentially having to be energy autonomous, photovoltaic (PV) cells are often
used to harvest ambient light energy to power the IoT-WSN. This dismisses the need
for battery replacement, allowing the IoT-WSN to be left in a “Deploy and Forget”
mode.
Recent trending in the miniaturization of IoT-WSN, has led to more research needing
to be done to find an alternative way to provide the IoT-WSN with sufficient energy
while having footprint sizes reduced. With lesser area available for the solar cell to
harvest sufficient energy for the IoT-WSN, one of the possible solutions to it is to use
PV-Tower solar cell to harvest light energy.
In this report, studies will be done on the IoT and the basic theories of the PV solar
cells. An energy autonomous IoT circuit board device was developed and built by
integrating the hardware components of the IoT circuit board, the solar cells and the
communication module together. The IoT circuit board demonstrated how the solar
cell was able to harvest light energy to charge the battery cell, enabling the IoT device
to function regularly and allowing wireless transmission of data readings to be
uploaded onto a cloud storage (ThingSpeak).
Experiments and data collection were done using a conventional planar solar cell and
a PV-Tower solar cell. The results gathered proved that it is possible to build an energy
autonomous and self-sustaining IoT system which uses solar cell to harvest energy,
where it could be left in a “Deploy and Forget” mode. In addition, comparison of
energy harvested using the planar solar cell and the PV-Tower solar cell data collection
results shows that the PV-Tower solar cell is significantly more efficient and effective
in harvesting more solar energy per footprint as compared to the planar solar cell, allowing
it to possibly address the footprint size constraints challenges posed by miniaturization
of the IoT-WSN. |
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