3D-Printed Weather Stations Could Enable More Science for Less Money
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story.
3D-Printed Weather Stations Could Enable More Science for Less Money:
Commercial weather stations can cost thousands of dollars, limiting both their availability and thus the amount of climate data that can be collected. But the advent of 3-D printing and low-cost sensors have made it possible to build a weather station for a few hundred dollars. Could these inexpensive, homegrown versions perform as well as their pricier counterparts?
[...] A team at the University of Oklahoma followed the guidance and open source plans developed by the 3-D-Printed Automatic Weather Station (3-D-PAWS) Initiative at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research to print over 100 weather station parts. Instead of using polylactic acid, more commonly used in 3-D printing, they turned to acrylonitrile styrene acrylate, a type of plastic filament considered more durable outdoors. Coupled with low-cost sensors, the 3-D-printed parts provide the basis for these new systems, which the 3-D-PAWS Initiative established as promising in earlier experiments.
[...] While the 3-D-printed system did start showing signs of trouble about five months into the experiment-the relative humidity sensor corroded and failed, and some parts eventually degraded or broke-its measurements were on par with those from a commercial-grade station in the Oklahoma Mesonet, a network designed and implemented by scientists at the University of Oklahoma and at Oklahoma State University.
[...] In the experiment, the low-cost sensors accurately measured temperature, pressure, rain, UV and relative humidity. With the exception of a couple of instruments, the plastic material held up in the Oklahoma weather from mid-August 2018 to mid-April the following year, a period that saw strong rainstorms, snow and temperatures ranging from 14 to 104 degrees F (-10 to 40 degrees C). A 3-D-printed anemometer, which measures wind speed, did not perform as well, but could be improved partly with better printing quality.
Journal Reference:
Adam Theisen, Max Ungar, Bryan Sheridan, et al. More science with less: evaluation of a 3D-printed weather station [open], Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-4699-2020)
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