ECO: An IoT platform for wireless data collection, energy control and optimization of a miniaturized wind turbine cluster: Power analysis and battery life estimation of IoT platform

An 8×8 (64) Internet of Things (IoT) wind farm platform is built using miniaturized wind turbines with wireless connectivity. The farm is being deployed on the south east coast of Ireland to remotely collect data for offline evaluation of a data driven wind turbine power output model and study aerodynamic interactions between turbines within the farm. The cluster is build such that a range of different downwind distances (between the turbines) can be tested with minimum rearrangement effort. To remotely collect data for an offline evaluation of wind turbine power models, each turbine within the farm is equipped with an IoT platform. Each of the 64 turbines simultaneously will report its voltage output measured across a load resistor. An ultrasonic wind sensor equipped with the same IoT platform will measure the wind speed and wind direction necessary for the offline wind turbine power model evaluation. In this work we present an energy analysis for the IoT platform (node) based on lab power measurements conducted while running firmware that will be used on the deployment site. The work emphasizes the potential of using an inexpensive wireless, battery powered, IoT node for remote data collection in preference to a wired solution using a data-logger that has limited storage that cannot be remotely accessed.