Measurement of Global Solar Radiation data using Raspberry Pi and its estimation using Genetic Algorithm

The demand for more efficient and environmentally benign, non-conventional sources of energy came into picture due to increasing demands for human comforts. Solar energy is now the ultimate option. In this paper, the instruments used to measure the solar radiation at Innovation Centre, MIT Manipal were connected to a Raspberry Pi to access the data remotely. Genetic Algorithms were formulated, so that the monthly mean global solar radiation in Manipal can be effectively estimated. Meteorological data such as humidity, temperature, wind speed, etc. were used as inputs to train the networks. A successful network was made between the data loggers and the Raspberry Pi. The data collected by the data loggers from the devices are transmitted to the Raspberry Pi which in turn sends the data to an internal server. The Raspberry Pi can be accessed using any SSH client such as PuTTY. The meteorological data was collected for the years 2010-2014 in order to formulate the Artificial Intelligence models. The validity of the formulated models were checked by comparing the measured data with the estimated data using tools such as RMSE, correlation coefficient, etc. The modelling of solar radiation using GA was carried out in GeneXpro tools version 5.0.