High-Level Project Summary
Our project consists in a mobile app called [name] used for collecting and showing metheorological data for solar energy production purposes. This app is a simplification of the NASA's POWER Data Access Viewer brought to the general public (neither scientists nor engineers) with some extra functionalities.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
The SDG #7 and why this project is necessary
Energy production is one of the main sources of global warming, due the use of fosil fuels that generate pollution. Solar power is one of the most popular solutions for this problem, but, as many renewable energies, it has several problems that make difficult its correct implementation.
Other thing to consider is the people motivation to use this type of energy. "Why should I move to solar power?" is a very often question that people ask while they are using cheaper and easy-to-access conventional energy sources.
Using data we can get closer to the solutions of this problems by obtaining meteorological and solar information based on a specific location for help the solar panel owners to take better decitions about their electrical installations, which implies better energy production, money saving and a contribution to decrease the global climate change according to the 7th Sustainable Development Goal
Why to make an app for this purpose?
The NASA's POWER Project is a website that provides a good solution for scientist, engineers and technical people interested in obtaining and manipulating solar and meteorological data sets for generating new information from them. But a problem comes up when we try to bring this platform to the general public, due the difficulties related to understand how to use it.
The customer journey map bellow can help to describe the people experience when they're trying to use the POWER Project platform.
Analysing the map, we can consider 4 main problems in the user experience:
- Finding the page:Difficult to know for the general public how to get to the page.
- Understand the page:There are several options and not a good tutorial about how to use them.
- Understand the parameters: A lot of technical and scientific information that wouln't be useful.
- Extract the data: What the general public is going to do with a JSON file? x_x.
Using an easy-to-find and easy-to-use mobile aplication we can improve the user experience on these steps. These are the main features of the app:
- Published in a secure online distribution mechanism (like the Play Store and the App Store).
- Simple and intuitive design, so everyone can know how to use it.
- Focused on what is important, so they have to set a few simple parameters and the graphs will be generated and showed.
- No need to storage any file on the user's phone.
Space Agency Data
The SolarSpark methodolody
Data extraction
POWER Data Access Viewer provides a lot of information and metrics about the sun around. SolarSpark takes this data of an specified user location through the POWER API, which is going to take a JSON file generated by the web platform and transform it into a Java Object. This object will be ploted on the screen as a graph and be used for the some calculations about energy consumption.
This process can be technically explained better with the following flowchart:
This API and the data contained in the web platform are the main resource provided by NASA's POWER Project and used for us.
App functionality
As the user of this product is going to be the general public, we kept it simple to use. The steps go from pointing a location on the map and setting the parameters that the user wants to see, to looking at the line charts generated from the data and making conclusions about the information displayed. The general SolarSpark flowchart explains this process:
Case Study: Solar irradiance at Universidad Católica Santiago de Guayaquil, Guayas, Ecuador
For this cases tudy, the location of the Catholic University of Guayaquil was taken as an example, and the data of the solar irradiation of all the months of the year 2020 was obtained to determine the feasibility of the placement of solar panels as well as the possible savings that would represent for the institution. Below is the graph of solar irradiation obtained, where we observe the peaks of solarradiation in the months of August to November.
We assume 10 m2 available for the installation of solar panels and with this we determine an approximate amount of electrical power generated
Estimated Generated Power
It is calculated with the area entered by the user and the average solar irradiation generated for a year, the average efficiency of commercial solar panels is also taken to calculate the estimated power that the solar panel would be delivering given the location.
To obtain the total power that is incident on the surface, we must integrate over the whole surface, further we must consider that light is incident from all the different directions.
were
Another very important radiometric property is the irradiance Ie that tells us the power density at a certain point (ξ, η) of the surface
The voltage of solar cells increases logarithmically with increasing irradiance. Hence, illuminating a solar cell with concentrated sunlight helps to increase the efficiency.
Therefore taking the irradiance and transformer to Hours usseful we obtain an aproximate of E in a moth of
E = 345W
the we extrapolated the aproximate data of a power consume and the consume with the addition of the solar power and we obtain the electrical saving of the institution per month
being the cost of kWh $ 0.12 the approximate saving with solar panels in a year would be $ 45.51 and in 10 years it will be $454,17 depending of the type of solar panel installed the beneficst could increase with time or be cheaper at the instalation
Hackathon Journey
We started from 2018 participating on the NASA Space Apps Challenge. A lot of fails and frustration made us learn more about how to work together as a team and explain our ideas efficiently.
This year, motivated by the global warming, we decided to participate in these challenge as a way to contribute to solve this problem.
References
Tools / Coding Languages/ Software Used:
- Java
- Android Studio
- JSON
- Illustrator
- Figma
Other webpages
Tags
#datascience #mobileapp #energy #solarpower
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.