Two FPGA-Oriented High-Speed Irradiance Virtual Sensors for Photovoltaic Plants

Abstract

Knowing solar irradiance value allows an optimized management of photovoltaic (PV) power plants in terms of produced energy. Unfortunately, although sensing temperature is easy, the measurement of solar irradiance is expensive. In this paper two circuit architectures for the estimation of the solar irradiance based on simple measurements are proposed. They are thought to be part of a centralized system implemented on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) for sensing and monitoring of solar irradiance in a whole PV plant. The FPGA centralized architecture could allow for a real time irradiance mapping by exploiting information coming from several low-cost measuring circuits suitably allocated on the PV modules. Validations on real irradiance data collected by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory are presented.

VLSI Design of Trusted Virtual Sensors

“…Neural networks and fuzzy logic techniques are used widely to obtain black- and gray-box models [ 6 , 7 ]. PieceWise-Affine (PWA) virtual sensors are also employed to provide black-box models [ 8 , 9 , 10 ].…”

“…However, faster responses, smaller sizes and lower power consumption are achieved if virtual sensors are implemented in hardware. Solutions that employ PWA Simplicial (PWAS) models implemented in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) were proposed in [ 9 , 10 ]. PWAS-based virtual sensors are simpler to implement in FPGAs than neural-network-based sensors and provide higher computation speed, as shown in [ 10 ].…”

“…Solutions that employ PWA Simplicial (PWAS) models implemented in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) were proposed in [ 9 , 10 ]. PWAS-based virtual sensors are simpler to implement in FPGAs than neural-network-based sensors and provide higher computation speed, as shown in [ 10 ]. FPGA implementations of PWA functions based on hyper-rectangular partitions (PWAR-based models) are further simpler than PWAS-based models, as shown in [ 11 ].…”

“…Both PWAR and PWAS forms are able to approximate any function and extract any black-box model. The PWAS form has been widely explored for virtual sensors [ 9 , 10 ]. However, the PWAR form is selected herein since its implementation is simpler than PWAS implementation.…”

A Portable Implementation on Industrial Devices of a Predictive Controller Using Graphical Programming

“…A wide range of applications in the field of electrical systems employ FPGAs [19]- [21]. The authors in [19] developed a reliable low-complexity reusable digital controller, by using an FPGA implementation.…”