Bio

Ruben just completed his first year in the master’s program of renewable energy engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and will return in the fall to complete his thesis.

Ruben’s latest project was the development of software and hardware that is used to measure the quantity of energy saved through the usage of solar water heaters.

Ruben is interested in using microcontrollers to collect data in various types of sensors, utilizing Mathematica to identify correlations between energy consumed/water consumption and the socioeconomic status of various populations.

Computational Essay

One-Dimensional Conduction across a Tube »

Project: Measurement and Visualization of Energy Production “Solar Heaters”

Goal of the project:

Developing a web interface using Wolfram technologies that shows the energy produced by a solar heater and the hot water consumed by the user. The program will be configured to send an automated report to the user every month.

Summary of work:

An Arduino microcontroller was used to collect temperature and flow variables. With these variables, it was possible to calculate the energy produced and the volume of water consumed by the solar heater. Following the integration of energy and volume consumed, the data was sent to the Wolfram Data Drop. After processing the information, different visualization schemes were developed to show the production of energy, water consumption and water temperature during the useful life of the system.

Results and future work:

A webpage was generated using the Wolfram Cloud, making it possible to view the data in real time. As future projects, we seek to monitor renewable energy–generating systems, as well as managing technologies that involve the IoT for the automation and monitoring of workspaces and housing.