Horia Hedesiu

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Horia Hedesiu received his B.Sc. and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania (formerly Polytechnic Institute of Cluj) in 1991 and 1999 respectively. He is currently a Professor with the Electrical Machines and Drives Department at the TUCN. He has authored over 100 papers in international journals, books, or communications to conferences. Horia Hedesiu is a co-author for two US patents in the field of embedded data acquisition systems. His research interests are in the information systems area, real-time simulation systems, Hardware-in-the-Loop, and also dedicating resources to industrial application implementations that involve machinery, graphical programming technologies and computer-based measurement systems. Horia Hedesiu is a managing director with National Instruments in Romania since 2005.

2chapters authored

Chapters authored

Virtual Instrumentation Used in Renewable Energy

By Petru Adrian Cotfas, Daniel Tudor Cotfas and Horia Hedesiu

The demand of energy increases once with the growth of population, and therefore, the finding of or improvement in the efficiency of renewable energy sources becomes very important for researchers and industry. The conversion of solar energy into electrical energy can be done based on photovoltaic or Seebeck effects. In the first case, photovoltaic panels are used, while in the second case, thermoelectric generators are used. The two can be combined to obtain the so-called hybrid systems, which have the goal to improve the overall conversion efficiency of the system. This chapter is focused on showing how the graphical programing language, called NI LabVIEW, together with a SPICE simulator, called NI Multisim, can be used for studying and understanding the behavior of the photovoltaic and thermoelectric generators as parts of the renewable energy sources. Different simulations developed in LabVIEW or Multisim are presented, and some monitoring and characterization applications are also described. Simple simulations to complex laboratory or industrial-level applications are dealt with in this chapter.

Part of the book: LabVIEW - Virtual Instrumentation in Education and Industry [Working title]

Related collaborators

Petru Adrian Cotfas

Department of Electronics and Computer, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Transilvania University of Brasov

Daniel Tudor Cotfas

Transylvania University of Brașov