The Victory of the CLAFIS Private Energy Solar Boat Team was Prepared with the SMP11
Published: Friday, March 25, 2016
The solar boat racing season has started! The Dutch championship for solar boats held in Akkrum, Friesland on 15th and 16th of May was the first official race for our team. What a great start it was with 1st and 2nd positions for our two solar boats as the result! Our next race will be the Solar 1 Monte Carlo Cup in Monaco, 9 to 11 July. In 2014 we won both races, and we are determined to bring in the grand prize from the Monte Carlo Cup as well this year.
Thanks to sponsorship by Kipp & Zonen our team used a SMP11 smart pyranometer to optimise the Maximum Power Point Trackers and solar panels in preparation of this year’s solar races (MPPT’s are the energy converters between the solar panels and the battery). By measuring the actual solar irradiance and the output power of the MPPT’s we were able to compare the performance of the different tracking algorithms in order to create the optimum situation with the best possible efficiency of the MPPT’s and solar panels.
The SMP11 has a Modbus® interface that provides digital values update every second. By implementing this in the test set-up we could log and analyse the data over a longer period which gave us a reliable impression of the to-be-expected performance of the MPPT’s and solar panels.
The quick response time, combined with the high accuracy of solar radiation measurement and Modbus® interface, definitely made the SMP11 the perfect choice. Due to the development of high efficient MPPT’s with fast tracking algorithms the SMP11 seamlessly matched the demands and objectives we needed.
Thanks Kipp & Zonen for the support!
If you would like to stay updated on our race results, please check our website at www.furiaone.nl or our Facebook account.
By Mark Scholten, Stichting Furia One