A Gas Monitoring System Based On Solar Cell And Wireless Sensor Network

A industrial gas monitoring system based on solar cell and wireless sensor network was designed in this paper, Semiconductor gas sensors based on micro-hotplate heating units are used in the sensor array of this system. Based on the needs of the application environment, different sensitive material can be added on the micro-hotplate to monitor different kinds of gases. Power generated from solar cells is sufficient enough for the sensor nodes. The chip of CC2530 from TI is used to design the communication and processing unit, while BQ24210 from TI, a single-Input, single cell li-ion battery solar charger is used as the solar-powered chip. IAR Embedded Workbench from IAR Systems is used to develop the Z-Stack protocol stack to achieve the function of data collection and wireless communication. WPF, Silverlight and SQL Server are used to design the PC software of the system, which enables user to configure the state of the system, as well as the function of storing, querying, processing and displaying of the data. The system also supports being accessed through Internet.The system designed in this paper used a dynamic organization algorithm to manage the network nodes, display and storage unit of the new node are generated by the control center dynamically. Solar-powered sensor nodes can be placed at places such as gas tank, gas pipelines or other places. The solar power eliminates the necessity to periodically change the battery. The functions of gas monitoring system were tested in this paper. The measurement results showed that the node fulfills the goal of being self-powered and can work for more than 80 hours even in the bad weather with no light. The management of the entire network can be done by the PC software, as well as storing all kinds of data and information of the network. The system could successfully monitor incidents happened within the network and gives alarm if there is gas leaks.