Remote Monitoring System Design for Photovoltaic Panels

Abstract

The design and implementation studies of a remote monitoring system are presented in this study. The proposed design is improved in terms of smart metering infrastructure based on current, voltage, and power measurements. The communication among the photovoltaic (PV) panels and host PC is performed by designed ZigBee transceiver system. Sensing circuits are very important devices to measure for both current and voltage magnitudes of electrical systems. The measured data are processed by the microcontroller unit (MCU) and are modulated after signal processing operations for wireless transmission. Although the transceiver is configured to execute bi-directional communication, unidirectional data flow is performed where the smart metering system transmits data to monitoring substructure. The monitoring software is also implemented in the context of the presented study. The performed experimental studies showed that the proposed real time monitoring and smart metering system could be exploited to monitor current, voltage and power magnitudes of the PV panels in an efficient way.

Existing System

Smart Load Tracking and Reporting for Real-Time Metering in Electric Power Grids.

Proposed System

This paper presents a design and implementation studies of a smart metering and real time monitoring system. The proposed smart metering infrastructure is capable of monitoring current, voltage and power values. In the design, ZigBee communication protocol is utilized between the PV panels and host PC. An important part of the proposed system is sensing circuits that are employed to measure current and voltage magnitude of the system. The acquired data by sensing circuits are processed in terms of signal processing operations via the microcontroller. Even though the ZigBee transceiver is capable of the bi-directional communication feature, unidirectional data flow is carried out in which smart metering system convey data to the monitoring substructure. This paper is performed to constitute an AMI infrastructure at LV grid. The AMI operations are taken into account include monitoring, metering, and communication concepts of smart grid management approach. The smart metering system is designed for solar plants that will be utilized at single-phase LV grids. The designed current and voltage measurement systems are implemented in order to measure amplitude values at the output of photovoltaic (PV) panel. The host PC where the transmitted data are collected and stored is shown on the right hand side. The measurement boards are implemented by using several designs with CASR 25-NP current transducer, and resistor networks to compare the accuracy, efficiency and cost. The aforementioned measurement nodes are also illustrated in the figure. The measured amplitude waveforms are connected to analog-to-digital (ADC) ports of the microcontroller as the signals to be processed. Afterwards, the processed measurement signals are transmitted to serial connection ports of the MCU, and the ZigBee transceiver transfers the data to energy monitoring center where the host PC is available.

Architecture

The block diagram of the designed monitoring and smart metering system