The Development of an Open Hardware and Software System Onboard Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Monitor Concentrated Solar Power Plants

Abstract

Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants are increasingly gaining interest as a source of renewable energy. These plants face several technical problems and the inspection of components such as absorber tubes in parabolic trough concentrators (PTC), which are widely deployed, is necessary to guarantee plant efficiency. This article presents a system for real-time industrial inspection of CSP plants using low-cost, open-source components in conjunction with a thermographic sensor and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The system, available in open-source hardware and software, is designed to be employed independently of the type of device used for inspection (laptop, smartphone, tablet or smartglasses) and its operating system. Several UAV flight missions were programmed as follows: flight altitudes at 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 and 120 m above ground level; and three cruising speeds: 5, 7 and 10 m/s. These settings were chosen and analyzed in order to optimize inspection time. The results indicate that it is possible to perform inspections by an UAV in real time at CSP plants as a means of detecting anomalous absorber tubes and improving the effectiveness of methodologies currently being utilized. Moreover, aside from thermographic sensors, this contribution can be applied to other sensors and can be used in a broad range of applications where real-time georeferenced data visualization is necessary.

A UAV-Based Framework for Semi-Automated Thermographic Inspection of Belt Conveyors in the Mining Industry

“…To the best of our knowledge and disregarding patents [26,27], this is the first industrial-scale application of aerial thermography for rollers' inspection. Other works linking thermography and UAV are focused on diverse applications, like crop management [29,30], power line [31,32] monitoring, and solar power plants inspection [33][34][35]. The works of [36,37] are examples of applications that use drones and machine learning algorithms to aid inspection processes.…”

From Lab on a Chip to Point of Care Devices: The Role of Open Source Microcontrollers

“…This in turn raises the cost, hence opposing the realization of PoC devices [ 10 ]. Now, however, we believe that a lot of the potential difficulties and obstacles for obtaining electronic control and read-out have been addressed, and to an increasingly larger extent, solved, in the last few years, due to the rise of the open source community, especially within open source hardware [ 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ]. In this insight review, we discuss open source microcontroller based platforms, specifically the Atmel-family of microcontrollers used in the incredibly popular Arduino development boards, and the application of the Arduino platform in the field of LoC.…”