Hybrid Pump Hydro-Photo Voltaic System for Agriculture Applications

Traditional Fuel sources likes petroleum products are in great use by the modern society and the greatest challenge present due to this is the fact that burning traditional fuel poses greatest environmental threat - global warming. Researchers have been extensively working on finding alternate sources of energy and the most prominent solution suggested is the use of renewable energy sources like solar, wind etc. Being the most widely available renewable energy sources, solar energy from photovoltaic system is ideally considered as the best option. But power generation from solar energy is complicated due to the fluctuation in the source. Various algorithms for maximum power tracking are suggested by researchers for handling the fluctuation issue. Smart agriculture is an evolving domain where technological developments have been used for the efficient and better agricultural efforts. The proposed system can be described as a smart irrigation system which uses sensors deployed in the farm to collect soil moisture, humidity, temperature and wind speed to identify the pattern of irrigation for the specific plants in the farm and based on the decision taken by the control system irrigation is carried out by pumping the water from the stored tank. Solar power is used for pumping water from stored tank. During this process of moving the water from the overhead stored tank to farm land, electricity is generated using hydro power plant model which will charge the battery system. This gives 2 options for power generation which is used to pump the water from overhead tank to farm land as well as pumping water to overhead tank from bore well or similar water resources. The decision for starting and stopping water pumping to overhead tank as well as pumping from water tank to farmland are controlled by the sensor data which makes the system autonomous and intelligent. The advantages of IoT system concepts are utilized to deploy the above mentioned smart irrigation system which also has a user interface which allows the farmer to know the details real-time.