New sensors measuring temperature and humidity will help university to cut costs

15 inconspicuous houses, which hide an indoor weather station, were handed over by the staff of the Department of Materials and Technologies to the UWB Operations and Services Department. This is a further extension of the SmartCampus project, which allows researchers to test new technologies.

They measure the temperature, humidity and other parameters of the surrounding environment and thus help to determine whether the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen manages its buildings in such a way that they do not waste energy. Experts from the Department of Materials and Technology at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering have been working on the smart sensors built into the box and testing them for the past year. The Department of Cybernetics at the Faculty of Applied Sciences collaborated on the software.

The Department of Operations and Services will now deploy the 15 houses throughout the buildings. "The great benefit is mainly the mobility of the measurements; if necessary, we can move the tiny house almost immediately to any location and, based on the measured temperature, optimize the settings of the heating system, which can prevent overheating of rooms and reduce operating costs," said Barbora Jánská, director of Operations and Services Department at UWB.

The collected data will be evaluated by the Energy Department staff in cooperation with building managers and the parameters of the heating system will be adjusted. "The result is a system of autonomous sensor units in the form of mobile homes that communicate in the LoraWAN IoT network. They can send the measured data, for example, at hourly intervals to a server, where they are then accessible to the user in the form of clear graphs including historical data," explained Petr Kašpar from Faculty of Electrical Engineering UWB.

Students from the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art worked on the design of the sensors, which could have a different shape in the future. From the very beginning of the project, they were in a team together with experts from FEL and FAV so that the final design respected the technical requirements of the proposed system.

UWB pays tens of millions of crowns annually in energy costs. Therefore, the long-term focus is on reducing the energy consumption of buildings and facilities. For example, the university is currently completing the insulation and reconstruction of the Baarova Street dormitories and will soon split the heating branches in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering building to increase the flexibility of temperature control.