A Low-Cost System for Measuring Wind Speed and Direction Using Thermopile Array and Artificial Neural Network

Recent developments in wind speed sensors have mainly focused on reducing the size and moving parts to increase reliability and stability. In this study, the development of a low-cost wind speed and direction measurement system is presented. A heat sink mounted on a self-regulating heater is used as means to interact with the wind changes and a thermopile array mounted atop of the heat sink is used to collect temperature data. The temperature data collected from the thermopile array are used to estimate corresponding wind speed and direction data using an artificial neural network. The multilayer artificial neural network is trained using 96 h data and tested on 72 h data collected in an outdoor setting. The performance of the proposed model is compared with linear regression and support vector machine. The test results verify that the proposed system can estimate wind speed and direction measurements with a high accuracy at different sampling intervals, and the artificial neural network can provide significantly a higher coefficient of determination than two other methods.