Development and Performance Evaluation of Photovoltaic (PV) Evaluation and Fault Detection System Using Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation for PV Applications

Abstract

This paper originally presents a photovoltaic (PV) evaluation and fault detection (PVEFD) system for PV applications based on the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The PVEFD system consists of an STM32F103C8T6 chip with a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M3 reduced instruction set computer (RISC) and 12-bit resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to measure important parameters of PV applications, such as solar irradiance as well as the back-surface cell temperature, operating voltage, and output current of PV devices. The measured data of irradiance as well as back-surface cell temperature and operating voltage of PV devices are then fed into a built-in PV model in the on-chip Arm Cortex-M3 RISC for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation to obtain the simulated output current and power of PV devices. The resulting data are transmitted to a cloud server for remote monitoring and automatic warning function through a Raspberry PI 3 module and WiFi network. The simulation results are compared with in-field measurement data from PV modules and displayed on a human–machine interface (HMI) and an Android app. The results of the study illustrated that the proposed system features high accuracy and sufficient confidence. Furthermore, the fault detection function through the built-in HIL simulation function in PV systems was validated. Therefore, the proposed system is a small, compact, and cost-effective HIL-on-chip machine for remote surveillance of PV power systems.

Smart monitoring technique for solar cell systems using internet of things based on NodeMCU ESP8266 microcontroller

“…However, the system has two limitations, which are i) the limit of the distance of the Wi-Fi module and ii) the security of measured data. On the other hand, the reliance of the implemented strategy in the proposed system on NodeMCU ESP8266(ESP-12E) distinguishes it from its peers, which depend on Arduino [24], [25] (Uno, Nano, Mega), field-programmable gate array (FPGA) [26], [27], and Raspberry Pi [28]- [30] in its low cost, ease of programming, and availability. Table 1 summarizes the comparison between available previously designed IoT-based systems for monitoring the PV systems in the 2018-2023 period and the implemented IoT system in our article.…”

A Novel Design of a Low-Cost SCADA System for Monitoring Standalone Photovoltaic Systems

“…A 4×20 LCD with I2C interface was connected to the Arduino UNO board to be turned on with each iteration to display monitored results. Authors of [7] proposed that the PV panel current and power was first transferred from STM32 chip to Raspberry Pi 3 module via UART Tx/Rx interface. Then, the data was forwarded to a cloud server by Wi-Fi module on Raspberry Pi 3 and displayed on an Android app.…”

“…For data storage solutions, the SD card was massively adopted by the previous works [5,6,8,9]. ThingSpeak is another popular choice for remote data storage [7,10]. Nevertheless, data stored in the SD card are difficult to retrieve, especially when the standalone PV system locates in remote areas.…”