Remote monitoring and evaluation of a photovoltaic (PV) groundwater pumping system

Abstract

Potable water, and especially the accessibility to it, is an essential part of everyday life. Of particular note, is the challenge that residents of remote rural African villages face in order to gain access to this basic requirement. Specifically, the rural areas in the Northern Cape (Province north of Cape Town) region in South Africa is one such example that illustrates this problem very well. In order to address the requirements for drinkable water, various types of water pumping technologies have been used. Up to now, the two competing water pumping systems, diesel and photovoltaic (PV), have been the primary technologies deployed in selected sites in the Northern Cape. The manual data collection of water pumping system data in the Northern Cape is fraught with impracticalities such as travel costs and requirements for skilled personnel. Therefore, as a preliminary step to accelerate development and testing, a local experimental laboratory PV water pumping rig was set-up within the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Cape University of Technology. A short-term analysis was performed over a period of three weeks on the rig and the experimental results indicated the following: array efficiency of 16.3%, system efficiency of 15.0% and an average system efficiency of 1.47%. However, the results do indicate that long-term monitoring of PV water pumping systems can be suitable in serving to determine dynamic system performance and system life cycle costs. The purpose of this project is two-fold - firstly, to present the results on the work done on the experimental PV system.