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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Coming Soon

Finally, we are almost there. Our first product – a joint development result of cooperation between IACS and RTOS.BE – is about to be commercialized. The Energy2Switch is a DC switch board with 2 channels rated up to 50V and 40A. Continuous power is limited at 1500W per channel, which boils down to 40A @ […]

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Investigating the Wind-turbine to dump load switching – part 3, other alternatives

An alternative relay we have not looked at, until now, is the latching or bistable relay. This kind of relay will only use power when changing state from open to close or from close to open. Also, it keeps its last state. Those properties could be interesting, because one of the problems we face in […]

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Investigating the Wind-turbine to dump load switching – part 1

The (most obvious?) switching solution would be a high-power relay. In a previous article, we already did an experiment with a Solid State relay (and we will continue to do so). Now we will look further into the ‘contactor’. The ‘kit’ we ordered  from www.iacs.co.uk (via Ebay) is a relay board with optical isolation (to […]

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PMD1 sensor board: our first hardware component

We are pleased to announce the creation of our very first hardware component: the PMD1 sensor board. We won’t let you wait, here is a beautiful image: Now, let us start with the global picture. The sensor board is part of Power Management Decision 1 (see Figure on the right). PMD1 decides whether the power […]

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Some basic hands-on experience with a dump load

Introduction The dump load (already introduced here) is used to burn the excess energy of our battery charger. The excess is typically generated by the wind turbine in windy conditions. In contrast with solar energy, the battery charger must accept wind energy in order to protect the wind turbine. For that reason the dump load […]

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Domain knowledge and application information

Introduction Building the right product requires customer input and domain knowledge. Building the product right requires a technical expertise and (possibly) a development process. In this post we focus on improving our domain knowledge. As mentioned in one of our previous blog articles, the more domain knowledge we acquire, the better we can define the […]

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