Facilities

 

The RIA Renewable Energy testbed is located in the Energy Lab, Richard Weeks Hall of Engineering (2nd floor, Room 224). The exact address is 500 Bartholomew Rd, Piscataway, NJ 08854.

Below is a breakdown of our facilities:

 

A fully digitized off-grid 2.4 MW solar system, with discrete tilt control, is fully operational at the lab and is being used to power local devices and equipment. The solar array is equipped with state-of-the-art sensors of soiling ratio, back of module temperature, power generation, battery state of charge, plane of array (POA) irradiance. 

 

 

 

 

 

An OTT Razon+ Solar Tracker collects solar irradiance (GHI, DNI, DHI) for renewable energy performance assessment and forecasting analytics. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A sky imager from EKO instruments is used for sky condition monitoring, segmentation, and analysis. This capability is being utilized to aid with solar energy forecasting (clouds are major determinants of short-term solar energy fluctuations). Attached to the imager is a digital thermopile pyranometer which collects co-located solar irradiance measurements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A research-grade meteorological station from Campbell Scientific Inc. which includes the following sensors and components: (i) A wind monitor for measuring wind speed and direction, (ii) a digital thermopile pyranometer for measuring solar irradiance, (iii) air temperature and relative humidity probe, and (iv) a CR6-Wi-Fi measurement and control datalogger.

 

 

 

 

 

An AUTEL Evo II Drone Explorer is being used in the laboratory for drone-based inspection and automated maintenance operations. The drone is equipped with a 48-megapixel Gimbal camera with 8K, 6K, DUAL Thermal payload options, and a 40-minute flight time, with obstacle avoidance features.

 

 

 

 

Real-time monitoring of renewable energy data from the solar energy testbed on dual screen display. Data transmitted through a local network and specialized data logger software. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A DELL PowerEdge T640 with two Intel Xeon Gold 6132 processors, and 2.4 TB of space.  The server is currently used by Dr. Aziz Ezzat’s group to store, process, develop, and implement data science algorithms, computations, simulations, and Big data analytics at high processing speeds. All members of the RIA group have user access to the server and can remotely connect to run their computational experiments.