Enabling Data Communication over Solar PV Cells

Student Name: Arshan Zaman and Shivam Singh

Roll Number: 2016136 and 2016196

BTP report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the Degree of B.Tech. in Electronics & Communications Engineering
on 15.04.2019

BTP Track: Research Track

BTP Advisor
Dr. Abhijit Mitra
Dr. Anand Srivastava
Dr. G. S. Vishveshwaran

Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology

New Delhi
 Student’s Declaration

I hereby declare that the work presented in the report entitled ”Enabling Data Communi-
cation over Solar PV Cells” submitted by me for the partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Bachelor of Technology in Electronics & Communications Engineering at In-
draprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, is an authentic record of my work carried
out under guidance of Dr. Abhijit Mitra, Prof. G.S. Viswheshwaran and Prof. Anand
Srivastava. Due acknowledgements have been given to Research Engineers of IIIT Delhi for
their support. This work has not been submitted anywhere else for the reward of any other
degree.

.............................. Place & Date: .............................

Arshan Zaman
..............................
Shivam Singh

Certificate

This is to certify that the above statement made by the candidate(s) is correct to the best of
my knowledge.

.............................. Place & Date: .............................

Dr. Abhijit Mitra

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 Abstract

As the telecom services evolve towards 5G, service providers are exploring innovative technologies
which are easier to deploy, provide high data rate communication and enable dense network
connectivity at a low cost. Visual Light Communication (VLC) can achieve the above objectives
as it uses of the shelf Light Emitting Diode (LEDs) which are widely deployed and provide
high bandwidth. In our proposed VLC system, while using an off-the-shelf LED as a light
source, we demonstrate data communication using a Photo Voltaic (PV) organic solar cell as
the photodetector. In this paper a receiver is designed to establish a solar communication system
and achieve the maximum possible data rate using On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation scheme.
This project is likely to have a strong impact in enabling Rural Communication and Internet of
Things (IOT) area.

Keywords: Visual Light Communication , Rural Communication, Internet of Things and Optical
Communication
Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Dr.Abhijit Mitra for continuously guiding us throughout the work
done in this semester and keeping us constantly motivated to achieve results. We would also
like to thank Prof. G.S. Visweswaran and Prof. Anand Srivastava for their invaluable guidance
and help in this project.

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Contents

1 Introduction 4

2 Research Objectives 5

3 Methodology 6
3.1 Modulation of LED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.2 Choice of solar cell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.3 Receiver Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.3.1 Amplifier Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3.2 Design of a unipolar to bipolar signal converter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.3.3 Comparator Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

4 Result 10

5 Conclusion and Future Work 12

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3
Chapter 1

Introduction

Gobal data consumption is now increasing at a rapid rate. As per [1], there has been an 18-folds
growth in mobile data consumption in the last 5 years. In 2016 itself, mobile data consumption
grew by nearly 63% and is expected to increase 7-folds between 2016-21 [1]. This increasing
capacity requirement has to be fulfilled in a cost effective manner and Visual Light Communi-
cation has the potential to address that. VLC has a number of key features that can handle the
demanding 5G system requirements for high capacity, high data rate, high spectral and energy
efficiency, low battery consumption, and low latency [2]. Using OFDM and micro LEDs (which
have higher bandwidths), data rates of upto 3 Gbits/s have been achieved [3]. VLC technology
utilises off the shelf LEDs to enable high data rate communication over wireless channel. One
of the main advantage of VLC is that it uses unlicensed spectrum and off the shelf LEDs which
reduces its cost of deployment. LEDs are now being increasingly deployed to meet energy effi-
ciency targets by nations. As per [4], LEDs can play a major role in the reduction of the carbon
footprint by large-scale deployment of highly innovative and eco-friendly LED lighting solutions.

In our project, we have chosen Photovoltaic (PV) cells as photodetector to establish a solar
based VLC system using an off-the-shelf LED as light source. This system has henceforth be
referred as SolarComm. SolarComm can prove to be an important key to future communication
because of its inherent potential to combine the telecom and renewable energy infrastructure on
a single platform. The power generated by solar cells is clean, green and pollution free and is
a good way to reduce the carbon footprint. According to [5], India has an average of 250-300
sunny days a year and unlike other renewable energy systems, the potential installation capacity
for solar is unlimited. There is a growing global need to move to renewable energy sources and in
a country like India with so much sunlight, solar energy harvesting and development is gaining
more and more momentum to meet the promised renewable energy demands. As a result, the
deployment cost of solar panels has decreased. Simultaneously using these panels for energy
harvesting and enabling data communication can have strong implications in both; the rural
and the urban telecom markets.

An appreciable data rate of 11.84 Mbps has already been demonstrated for a received opti-
cal signal with a peak-to-peak amplitude of 0.7*10-3 using a polycrystalline panel [6]. There
are 3 types of solar cells: polycrystalline, monocrystalline and organic. For our project, we
chose an organic solar cell as photodetector to establish the SolarComm system. The various
deliberations for choosing an organic solar cell have been elaborated in the subsequent chapters.

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Chapter 2

Research Objectives

The main objective is to demonstrate data communication using an off the shelf LED and or-
ganic solar cells.

The main steps to be enable SolarComm are:

• Modulation of LED: As a first step we take an off-the shelf available LED and modulate
it at a suitable frequency using OOK modulation. A Thor Labs photodetector is used to
capture the modulation bandwidth of the LED.

• Choice of Solar Cell: There are variety of solar cells namely; poly-crystalline, mono-
crystalline and organic. Each variant has its own characteristic efficiency and resposivity
to incident light. Therefore, the choice of solar cell to be used as a photodetector is impor-
tant. For SolarComm, the received signal peak to peak voltage, frequency response and
solar cell efficiency are some of the key parameters to make a choice. Among all the choices
the polycrystalline solar cell is widely available, however from the data from MNRE, it
has a low efficiency of approx. 12-14% [7]. Alternatively, monocrystalline cells have an
efficiency of aprrox. 16-19% [7]. In 2018, a high efficiency of 17.3 percent was reached for
organic cells [8]. However, the monocrystalline panels are difficult to procure as singular
cells. The entire considerations for choice of a solar cell has been elaborated in section 3.2.

• Receiver System Design: After LED modulation and solar cell selection, the receiver
circuit has to be designed such that the transmitted signal is received with minimum
error. Solar cells are likely to have high intrinsic capacitance and their response to a high
frequency OOK signal gives an attenuated output with rapid rise and fall time. Therefore
to gain significant SNR a complementary analog circuit has to be designed.

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Chapter 3

Methodology

3.1 Modulation of LED

The modulation scheme used in this project is on-off keying (OOK) which is the simplest form of
amplitude shift keying (ASK) in which ’1’s and ’0’s of a bit stream are indicated by the presence
or absence of a carrier wave. The LED was modulated with the help of a function generator. A
square wave function of 10 Volts peak-to-peak was fed to the LED. To identify the modulation
bandwidth of the LED, we used a Thor Labs photodetector with a large modulation bandwidth
of 10 MHz and high responsivity. When the input frequency of LED was increased, after 50 kHz
a saturation point was observed with no further increase in the modulation frequency of the
received signal. Thus, the off-the-shelf LED could be modulated to a maximum frequency of
50kHz. The intensity of light falling on the PV cell was 370 lux during OOK of the LED source.

3.2 Choice of solar cell

The choice was to be made between organic PV cell or polycrystalline cell. Monocrystalline
PV cells are not available not available as a singe component. Compared to silicon based
solar cells (monocrystalline and polycrystalline), organic solar cells are lighter, thinner, flexible,
inexpensive to fabricate, customizable, have less adverse environmental impact and have an
appreciable efficiency. To appropriately choose between polycrystalline and organic cell, the
output from both the cells were obtained and analyzed on an oscilloscope. The first observation
was that the response of the polycrystalline cell to high frequency was poor. The frequency of
the output signal from the polycrystalline cell changed rapidly and was hard to stabilize. In
comparison, the organic cell gave a much more stable frequency output. Next, a comparison of
the peak to peak voltage of both these cells was done. As seen from the PV cell outputs in Fig.
3.1 and Fig. 3.2, at the same distance, the organic cell gave an output of 820 mVpp as compared
to output of 494 mVpp from the polycrystalline . Thus after taking all the above factors into
consideration, the organic cell was selected for the experiment.

3.3 Receiver Design

At the receiver it is desirable to increase the peak to peak voltage of the organic solar cell signal
output. To acheive this, an amplifier circuit was designed to amplify the solar cell output to a
few volts which was then fed to the unipolar to bipolar signal converter( voltage shifter). The

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 Figure 3.1: Polycrystalline cell output

Figure 3.2: Organic cell output

rising edge represents ON or ’1’ and falling edge represents OFF or ’0’. Hence, it is important
to capture the sharp rise and fall of the shifted output to decide a ’1’ or ’0’. The signal output
of the voltage shifter is fed to a feedback comparator with bipolar reference voltage as shown
in Fig. 3.7. The comparitor ultimately captures the rising and the falling edge of the recieved
signal and the desired output is obtained.

3.3.1 Amplifier Design

The output from the organic cell in the designed setup was about 600 mV which needed to be
amplified by an amplifier circuit. The amplifier selected was instrumentation amplifier INA111
for high frequency operation. It has differential input with balanced input impedances and is
designed for much higher common mode rejection ratio which is desirable for high frequency
operation.

The gain provided by INA111 is given by the expression:

50k
G=1+ (3.1)
Rg

The Rg was chosen such that the output from the amplifier was more than 3 Vpp. On choosing
an Rg of 7.5 k-ohms, a peak to peak voltage of ∼3.3V (more than 3V) was obtained as output

7
 Figure 3.3: Output from the Amplifier (yellow waveform)

from the amplifier which was adequate for further signal processing.The output from the INA111
amplifier can be seen in Fig.3.3.

3.3.2 Design of a unipolar to bipolar signal converter

The unipolar amplified output from the INA111 amplifier had ∼3.3 Vpp and ranges from 6.37
V to 9.66 V. To convert this into a bipolar signal the circuit in Fig. 3.4 was designed.

Figure 3.4: Unipolar to bipolar converter circuit design

On implementation, the bi-polar voltage obtained was from -1.69 V to 1.76 V as seen in Fig.3.6.
The obtained bi-polar output was then fed to the comparator.

3.3.3 Comparator Design

After bi-polar output was fed to comparator, he final step was to design the comparator circuit
such that the rising and falling edge was captured. The comparator selected here was LM319N
which was a precision high speed dual comparator. It has a fast response which makes it precise
for high frequencies. The circuit shown in Fig.3.7 was designed. As seen in the circuit diagram,

8
 Figure 3.5: Output of unipolar to bipolar converter (green waveform)

Figure 3.6: Comparator circuit

the bi-polar signal is fed to the inverting end of the comparator. Reference voltage to the non-
inverting end was given as feedback from the output terminal and its value was adjusted with
the help of resistors so that the changing edges (rising and falling edge) could be captured. The
feedback reference voltage was provided by implementing a simple voltage divider circuit. The
circuit was implemented on LTSpice and the simulation result is shown in Fig.3.8.

Figure 3.7: LTSpice simulation output of comparator circuit

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Chapter 4

Result

After it was verified that all the three subsytems were working satisfactorily through practical
implementation as well as LTSpice simulations, they were integrated to form the complete
receiver circuit design as shown in Fig. 4.1.

Figure 4.1: Block Diagram of the final setup

The data communication system was operated at 25 kHz and the transmit and received waveform
can be seen in Fig 4.2. The output is a square wave function (which was the same function used
to modulate the LED) and as can be seen from the figure, it closely captures the transmitted
OOK signal. Thus the signal was recovered successfully till 25 kHz.

Figure 4.2: Final output waveform(green) at 25 kHz

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After this, the frequency was increased, and it was seen that till 42 kHz, the signal was recovered
closely (see Fig 4.3) implying that the entire developed setup works till a frequency of 42 kHz
successfully.

Figure 4.3: Final output waveform(green) at 42 kHz

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Chapter 5

Conclusion and Future Work

Thus, using the present circuit design, establishment of communication using PV cells up to
42 kHz has been achieved. After this, recovery was not very close mainly because the signal
obtained from the second subsystem (uni-polar to bi-polar converter) was not symmetrical at
exact 0. This could be made possible after more fine-tuning of the circuit (such as using more
exact capacitor values) and further working on the receiver circuit design.

This communication system can be considered a low data rate system which has quite a few
applications and can be used in a variety of fields like IoT, establishing control signals in em-
bedded systems,indoor localization, in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication etc. The organic
solar cells could serve as a future platform for present VLC receivers. These inexpensive flexible
panels could be integrated with an extremely wide range of devices since they can be mass
manufactured by roll-to- roll printing. Such receivers could have great implications for the con-
nectivity of future smart devices, from sensor networks to smart clothing.

The next step will be to achieve higher data rate on this solar cell communication system
and operate it at frequency of 500 kHz.

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