Low-cost web-based Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system for a microgrid testbed: A case study in design and implementation for academic and research applications

Carlos Vargas-Salgado; Jesus Aguila-Leon; Cristian Chiñas-Palacios; Elías Hurtado-Perez

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02474

Low-cost web-based Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system for a microgrid testbed: A case study in design and implementation for academic and research applications

Heliyon. 2019 Sep 30;5(9):e02474. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02474. eCollection 2019 Sep.

Authors

Carlos Vargas-Salgado^{1

2}, Jesus Aguila-Leon³, Cristian Chiñas-Palacios³, Elías Hurtado-Perez¹

Affiliations

¹ Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain.
² Instituto Universitario de Ingeniería Energética, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain.
³ Departamento de Estudios del Agua y de la Energía, Universidad de Guadalajara, Centro Universitario de Tonalá, Tonalá, Mexico.

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of a low-cost Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system based on a Web interface to be applied to a Hybrid Renewable Energy System (HRES) microgrid. This development will provide a reliable and low-cost control and data acquisition systems for the Renewable Energy Laboratory at Universitat Politècnica de València (LabDER-UPV) in Spain, oriented to the research on microgrid stability and energy generation. The developed low-cost SCADA operates on a microgrid that incorporates a photovoltaic array, a wind turbine, a biomass gasification plant and a battery bank as an energy storage system. Sensors and power meters for electrical parameters, such as voltage, current, frequency, power factor, power generation, and energy consumption, were processed digitally and integrated into Arduino-based devices. A master device on a Raspberry-PI board was set up to send all this information to a local database (DB), and a MySQL Web-DB linked to a Web SCADA interface, programmed in HTML5. The communications protocols include TCP/IP, I2C, SPI, and Serial communication; Arduino-based slave devices communicate with the master Raspberry-PI using NRF24L01 wireless radio frequency transceivers. Finally, a comparison between a standard SCADA against the developed Web-based SCADA system is carried out. The results of the operative tests and the cost comparison of the own-designed developed Web-SCADA system prove its reliability and low-cost, on average an 86% cheaper than a standard brandmark solution, for controlling, monitoring and data logging information, as well as for local and remote operation system when applied to the HRES microgrid testbed.

Keywords: Arduino; Cloud computing; Control system design; Data analysis; Data analytics; Data visualization; Electrical engineering; Electrical system; Energy; Hybrid renewable energy system; Power control system; Raspberry; Remote control and wireless monitoring; Renewable energy resources; Web-based SCADA.