Design of On-Line Monitoring System for Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Power Plants

Abstract

This paper describes the design of an on-line monitoring system for grid-connected photovoltaic plants. The proposed system consists of a meteorological data collection system for measuring meteorological parameters (e.g. irradiance, ambient air temperature, etc.), a set of data collection boxes for measuring electrical parameters (e.g. DC and AC current, DC and AC voltage, DC and AC power, etc.) and a PC. The collected data have been transmitted to the PC by two methods, wired transmission and wireless transmission. The software of the on-line monitoring system based on LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) package is used to process, display and store the collected data in the PC disk. The on-line monitoring system was installed in a grid-connected photovoltaic plant for an on-site measurement in Qinghai province in China. The obtained results demonstrate that it has the ability for data collecting, processing and analyzing and it meets the measurement requirements of grid-connected PV plants

Optimization of a Grid Connected Photovoltaic System using Fuzzy Logic Control

“…The tracking speed should be accelerated when the operating point is away from the maximum power point [14]. In effect, the duty ratio Regulation should be great when operating point is away from the maximum power point and small when the operating point is near or around the MPP [5]. Unfortunately, the methods discussed previously are not capable of meeting these requirements.…”

“…Due to the manufacturing process of the PV material, these liberated electrons migrate to the positively charged layer thus creating a potential difference. This phenomenon is known as the "photovoltaic effect" [5]. PV cells through the PV effect can directly convert the sunlight energy into electrical energy.…”

“…Some of these are the M -factor adaptive-step MPPT, neural network MPPT, ripple correlation control (RCC) MPPT and of course the central point of discussion of this research work which is the fuzzy logic control based MPPT [23]. Reference [5] revealed that, it will be an oversight to ignore the short-comings of these more intelligent methods. More so, it does not have the mathematical background and stability analysis that is needed for control system design.…”

“…Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy can be described as transformation energy or conversion of solar energy (radiation from the sun) to D.C electricity through a phenomenon known as the photovoltaic effect [5]. When energy from the sun reaches a solar panel, the panel by virtue of how it was designed, it transforms the solar energy into electrical power [6].…”

Performance Analysis of Two PV plants in Different Geographical Environment

“…The selected subsystems were fully monitored to analysis performance by a data acquisition monitoring system [2,3]. The data acquisition monitoring system was designed to meet guideline of standard IEC 61724 [4] and within the framework of the International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power System (IEA PVPS) Program TASK 2 [5,6].…”