Mobile phone has become the world's second continent, Africa, a new industry

Diverse Energy's powercube, which uses fuel cell technology to convert industrial gas into electricity without any carbon emissions, has gradually replaced conventional diesel generators. "LabVIEW's graphical programming environment accelerates the development and deployment process. If we are using text language programming to face the same programming challenges, we will not be able to achieve the current level of development in any case. -Dr. Mike Rendall, diverse energy ltd    Challenge: Develop a green off-grid solution to provide power to mobile base stations in remote parts of Africa.   Solution: Use ni Compactrio hardware and ni LabVIEW software to monitor ammonia decomposition, resulting in DC voltage current, and its decomposition residue is only some clean water and nitrogen. The new Powercube system provides a clean and stable supply of electricity to remote parts of Africa, which makes the coverage of mobile phone signals stable and deep.     Introduction According to UN reports, mobile phone usage in Africa grew by more than 500% between 2003 and 2008, and will continue to grow exponentially. As a result, mobile phones have become the world's second continent, Africa, an emerging industry. However, in places where there is not enough signal coverage, the phone is almost completely out of function. If you need to make a cell phone signal cover an area, you need a base station, which also means a certain scale and a steady supply of electricity. A base station can cover the geographical area is very limited, for a city needs a distributed base station network to provide sufficient signal coverage area, that is, a distributed and easy to maintain the power supply network. Africa's existing grid is neither distributed nor stable, and the situation in remote areas is even worse. In only a few of the grid-covered areas, the electricity supply can only be provided for a few hours a day and is not very stable. It has been suggested that diesel generators should be used to solve the problem, but this is far from an ideal solution. Diesel generators have a large noise and are very inefficient when not fully operational. They also need regular oil-change maintenance every 300 hours to keep their moving parts running properly. In addition, they emit soot and sulfur particles into the atmosphere, which has a bad effect on the environment. Another problem is that the diesel engine and the fuel it uses can be used for resale, making it easy to steal targets, especially in remote or unsupervised areas. Diverse energy uses fuel cell technology to solve this problem, using industrial gas to convert electricity to eliminate any carbon emissions. The current use of more industrial gas is ammonia, which is widely used in refrigeration and pharmaceutical industry. In addition, ammonia is also widely used in the field of agricultural fertilizers. In order to make ammoniaGas into electricity, the first need to concentrate on the bulk of ammonia, ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen, and then the hydrogen from the mixture of gas out, and then the pure hydrogen into the fuel cell, so as to generate electricity and water. In the diverse energy company's powercube system, NI Compactrio will monitor the entire conversion process.   Decomposition is also beneficial to powercube systems not only pollute the environment, but also produce useful decomposition materials. Powercube System The main decomposition is clean to the electronic water, a powercube one day can produce 50 liters of water, which can provide some of the lack of clean, clean water in areas of the vast resources. For some small companies, rapid market promotion is a very important part of their marketing model. If you spend too much time in the promotion process, you will miss out on some golden opportunities. LabVIEW's graphical programming environment accelerates the process of development and deployment, and if we are using text language programming to face the same programming challenges, we will not be able to achieve the current level of development anyway. Engineers and scientists use LabVIEW to quickly modify code based on the differences in the analysis test operation patterns. The traditional programming model requires a lot of programming experts to support the development team, which increases the cost of human and economic. We initially developed "Powercube 1th" with the NI Compact fieldpoint, but we decided to replace the platform when we found that Compactrio could provide faster processing speed and better support for global control and communication. The Compactrio platform also integrates a field Programmable gate array (FPGA) in the position of the chassis backplane, using the LabVIEW graphical interface to program with FPGA to improve the standard I/O functionality, including custom PWM and sinusoidal signal output. By embedding these functions in the FPGA, we reduce the processing burden of the controller, which allows the controller to perform other tasks. This also reduces the number of custom hardware, and can help reduce system costs and build time. Based on the extensible nature of LabVIEW, when we replace the hardware platform from the compact fieldpoint into Compactrio, 80% of the code can be reused, which saves us a lot of development time and cost. We spent 8 months developing and testing "Powercube 1th", but it took only two weeks to migrate it to the Compctrio platform, which included rewriting a custom FPGA image. Instead of using the compact FieldPoint system to collect dust, we let it control three separate test stations to test the fuel cell module. We will compact FieldpoinT is docked to a database so that any code modifications to the Powercube deployment will be updated by the test station in the next run. Testing on fuel cells in such a way is closely related to the formation of final product designs, as well as minimizing programming time and input.   Looking into the future we now have five powercube in Africa and are now ready to ship another five to the UK. The LabVIEW and Compactrio platforms are ideal for developing and on-site test systems, and they have a great advantage in the ability to easily monitor real-time data and quickly apply modified code when developing new systems.