Wind tracking and monitoring with multiple sensors
Measuring wind at several different spots is no easy task. Most weather stations offer only one wind sensor for wind monitoring and building your own sensor system from scratch is expensive and hard. In this article we investigate why you might want to measure wind in different locations, and we propose a combination of sensors, gateway and cloud to get you started with wind tracking quickly.
Wind analysis at different heights
The most obvious goal of measuring wind at different heights is when you’re planning to install your own wind turbine. On farms or industrial companies the advantages of generating your own energy are numerous.
As a farmer or plant manager you want to determine the best spot to locate your turbine in order to optimize the return. It is recommended to gather sensor data during a period of time so you can make the right decision.
Monitoring air flow between buildings
Another reason why you might want to measure at different locations is to investigate draft in or between buildings. Sometimes because of construction errors, heavy winds may be registered between buildings. Just as annoying are currents of air flowing inside a building, causing doors to slam or paperwork to blow around. Wind tracking could therefore help you out with determining what causes the problem.
This phenomenon is often attributed to a door or window that is left open, but a more complex architectural matter might be the cause. In this case, you need sensor data to find out when and where the wind is blowing.
How to connect multiple different wind sensors to one sensor gateway
Most weather stations that are commercially available connect only one wind sensor. This means in order to get multiple wind measurements for wind monitoring you would need several of these fully equipped stations. This can get expensive quickly.
That's where our technology comes in. Reporter has up to four universal M12 connectors, that fit any of the sensors from our shop. This also means you can connect up to four of the same wind tracking sensors at the same time.
For this demo project we connected three weather sensors to one Reporter. This meant we were measuring wind speed, peak speed and direction three times, but also temperature, humidity and rain.
Getting the hardware connected is a piece of cake. Each sensor comes with a waterproof M12 cable suited for outdoor use. All sensors are powered either by grid or solar power, making wind tracking possible even in remote areas.
How to access wind sensor data in the cloud
Sensor data is transferred using 2G or 4G to the cloud, where you can access it on the Crodeon Dashboard. Nothing special here. The Dashboard allowed us to configure the measurement interval and alarm thresholds. When we wanted to dive deep into the data collected by the wind monitoring, we used the Excel export.
We also offer a Rest API to integrate the wind-measuring data into your own platform. Many companies already have some kind of data platform and prefer to have all data in one app. You can call the API every minute without much trouble.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about wind tracking. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need assistance with your own sensor projects.
