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SlimmeMolen specs for Dutch mills

SlimmeMolen specs for Dutch mills by Victor Reijs is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Introduction

This gives an overview of what sensors for this mill project (Internet of Things molen -> SlimmeMolen) are needed and what the connectivity (power, Internet, cloud) is expected.

A project of using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) is running since Janaury 2023 to determine the windmill biotope.
The project aims are:

  1. Determine which parameters (and thus sensors) are important to determine/predict windmill biotope evaluation
  2. Prototype the SmartMolen ideas
  3. Get experience with CFD for determining the windmill biotope
  4. Validate CFD with actual measurements at a few windmills
  5. Evaluate CFD and other windmill biotope rules (DHM-formula [De Hollandsche Molen] and Stephen Temple Molenbiotope spreadsheet) and possibly propose possible improvements.
  6. Which CFD services can be used looking at pricing, user-friendliness, experience, etc.
  7. Provide a how-to-guide, workflow and training around windmill biotope for windmillers
  8. Publish the findings in mill-related publications and interested organisations

This web page looks mainly at bullet 1.Experience with a prototype of SmartMolen is available here.
Bullets 3 and 4 are covered in several separate pages for: Den Oord, Zwiepse Molen and Impington.
As part of the Impington and SlimmeMolen research, bullet 5 will be incorporated (DHM-formula and Steven Temple Molenbiotope-spreadsheet).
Bullets 6, 7 and 8 will be picked up as soon as more confidence has been gained with CFD and measurements (aka the earlier bullets).

A project has started (since Oct. 2024) by DHM to verify CFD with wind measurements at a Dutch mill (bullets 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8).

Why measuring around a mill?

There are a few areas why one wants to measuring things around a traditional wind mill:

Each of them has measurements that can support that area and will provide for a reference database of how wind mills perform and will allow the verification of modelling the mill's biotope.
Luckily these areas have some common measurements:

Measurements
Areas

Projects
Education
Security /
Maintenance
Productivity
Short term
local weather
prediction

Mill biotope
Spinning mills
eMill
smartmolen
SlimmeMolen
Revolutions per minute
x
x
x

x

x

x
x**
Number of turns per day and/or year
x

x



x
x
x
x
Miller presence
x
x







x
Rotational speed at tip

x







x
Material stress

x







x*****
Brake is released
x
x
x





x
x**
Mill can produce product

x
x






x
Storm/showers/lighting

x

x





x
Reference meteorological station(s)



x
x



x
x****
Weather maps
x
x

x





x**
Absolute wind speed/direction at mill***
x
x
x
x



x*** x**, ***, ****
Mill cap direction

x
x

x



x*, ***
x**, ***
Sail type


x







Turbulence Intensity

x
x

x




x**
Temperature



x



x
x
x
Air pressure



x



x

x
Humidity



x



x

x
Battery status








x x
Webcam
x







x
x

* The implementation of cap direction (mostly based on magnetometer) needs to be checked if it works for sporadic manual turning of (Dutch) wind mills
** These are measurements seen in 3 or more areas. So important to start with.
*** As the wind direction equipment is positioned on the cap, the cap direction is implicitly needed to determine the absolute wind direction.
**** If one wants to verify wind speed en direction; the values at the mill need to be compared with reference values at SYNOP/METAR/KLIM meteorological station(s).
***** Sampling rate needs to be around 10 per second (per 90deg rotation at least two samples [180end/min and Nyquist criterium]).

In general all measurements and their results need to be validated with theory and practice.

Sensors for the measurements

To perform these measurements, the following sensors are possible (F: fixed; R: Rotating with mill cap or sails; E: Every sensor):

Processor at the sensor

Each (or a combination of) sensors will have a processor (such as ESP32, ESP8266, Wemos, etc) and a WiFi connection. Preferable the sleep mode of each sensor should be used (to reduce power consumption).
Below remark can be handy in case of reed switches:
The anemometer and rain sensors in my weather station 2 use reed switches. To achieve low power, I had to use a second, low power processor chip to monitor the reed switches while the Wemos was in deep sleep.

Power for sensors

Some sensors (that are not in the mill cap, also reducing lighting strikes) will be connected to the mains. The sensors in the mill cap might be powered using: solar cells, wind turbine and/or batteries or using reliable drag contacts.

Connectivity within the mill

Each sensor has a WiFi connection (and if possible all sensors are meshed together in a WiFi mesh [like ESP-Mesh], one WiFi-ed sensor [perhaps in a mesh] can reach the outside world).
In case we want to measure Material stress some bandwidth needs to be available: 6 float variables (acceleration [xyz] and angular velocity [xyz]) and time . There will be some 15 Bytes JASON overhead and some 40+45 Bytes MQTT overhead (in total some 110Bytes, quite a lot). So that is at least some (7*4+110)*10*8bit/second : ~11kbit/sec. One could also store it on a 8GByte SD card, would be worth of 325days of data.

If a webcam (high speed WiFI), a fixed Internet or unlimited 4G SIM is needed (due to link to streaming services).
If only a magnetometer (LoRaWAN), revolution (LoRaWAN) and there is TTN (The Things Network) access; no LoRaWAN gateway is needed.
If magnetometer (LoRaWAN), revolution (LoRaWAN) and local weather station (WiFi), a LoRaWAN gateway, is needed.
If LoRaWAN gateway, one can use 4G or fixed Internet. If local weather station needs a lot of bandwidth: a (un)limited SIM might be needed (instead of a smartmeter SIM).

Extendibility/modularity of the mesh

Adding sensors to the mesh should be as easy as possible. At this moment, when a sensor is connected, it will be included in the platform.

Connectivity to the outside world

An Internet router (using: fixed, 4G or LoRaWAN) with the WiFi or possibly the use of a wireless mesh (ESP-Mesh). Thus providing access to database in the cloud using MQTT.

Software platform in the cloud

It would be nice if the smartmolen, Spinning mills and eMill projects are incorporated in all of the above. Using some ideas (like Mosquitto, Node-RED and InfluxDB on DigitalOcean) from this eBook. It is expected that per mill one needs at max. some 10MByte additional storage per month (120MByte/year).
Remark: The amount of Bytes needs to be determined over the coming time.

Installation, support and maintenance

Clear agreements need to be made around this. Quality and flexibility of the platform (at mill, cloud and service), trustworthiness of the party managing the SlimmeMolen service, confidence that the service will exist for a long time (5 to 10 years), good balance between costs and quality, support party that is eager to do innovations.

Cost of SlimmeMolen sensors and services

Costs around: equipment, installation, support, maintenance, cloud services, web services. A cost overview (using input from smartmolen project) has been made based on: equipment, support for a x year project (incl. CDF services), and a possible student with academic links.

Linking with weather prediction

Doing one's own measurements helps to support the interpretation of weather prediction. So including an overview of weather predictions (like KNMI weather charts and service like Windfinder) are important for the SlimmeMolen platform. See for some further examples here.

The SlimmeMolen prototype

At this moment we have the following IoT devices to prototype the SlimmeMolen platform: an ESP8266 D1 Mini (Molen1, incl. WiFi to Internet), an ESP8266 NodeMCU (Molen2, incl. WiFi to Internet); three ESP8266 NodeMUC (Molen3, incl. WiFi to Internet) and four ESP8266 plus one ESP32 (Molen4 incl. gateway between ESP-Mesh and Internet).

These IoT devices send MQTT messages from the following sensors: Temperatue&Humity&air Pressure (BME280 and BMP180 [no humidity]); cap Direction (QMC5883L*); Acceleration and Revolutions  (MPU-6050); Lighting strikes (AS3935); presence Switches (GPIO12 and GPIO14 of ESP8266); Real Time Clock X (DS3231); Micro SD card; Battery status (ADC of ESP8266); and WiFi or ESP-Mesh field strength (WiFi of ESP8266).
Here is an overview of the boxes configured and running:
Boxes
        in the SM prototype

The IoT devices communicate through WiFi or ESP-Mesh; depending which is possible/wanted.
The IoT devices' software has been built in such a way, that one can include the sensors, I/O devices and local network one wants at a mill (each processor will figure out itself which sensor(s) it has). If there is no WiFi or ESP-Mesh connectivity, it can still display the measured info on an local LCD (if plugged in) or store on micro SD card.
The generated JSON data can be seen in Node-RED UI, InfluxDB (own server and on Influx Cloud); on an LCD or OLED display; on a terminal connected to the ESP8266s/ESP32s; or on a micro SD card.

The below trial setup has been build up to now (for ESP8266/ESP32 setup see here).
MATT setup

Real-time graphs generated from boxes with several sensors (at this moment positioned at home) can be seen below.
The InfluxDB has been added (also running on DigitalOcean) to store all (some 30) measurements at an interval of 10 seconds. This to investigate the possible drift of the magnetometer over two months time. Hopefully we can also measure temperature gradients between a low and a high position with Molen4's two temperature sensors  (to check a theory of mine around low pressure areas).
Slimme Molen console

Experiences with the SlimmeMolen prototype

The following experiences were registered (for most bullets the 'molen' was in rooms of the house):

References

Benschop, Henk: Representativiteit windmetingen, in het bijzonder op luchthavens. In: (2005), issue KNMI Technisch Rapport TR-277.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank people, such as Justin Coomb, Rien Eykelenboom and others for their help, encouragement and/or constructive feedback. Any remaining errors in methodology or results are my responsibility of course!!! If you want to provide constructive feedback, please let me know.
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Major content related changes: March 21, 2024