Research of Stand-Alone Photovoltaic Power Generator Monitoring System

Abstract

To design and implement a stand-alone photovoltaic power generator monitoring system with remote control functions. The hardware architecture consists of solar cells, solar charger, DC/AC inverter, energy storage device, energy consumption equipment, electrical load, PLC controller, I/O card, router, and supervisory control computer, while the software is composed of programmable software and graphic supervisory control software. With the self-developed solar charger, the conversion efficiency of this system achieves 93.26%. Besides, with maximum power point tracking function, the solar cells could continuously output maximum power. The user-friendly human-machine interface would transmit the information acquired by PLC controller, through MODBUS TCP communications protocol, to the remote computer; this would supervise and control the voltage, electric current, power, fault detection, network monitoring, and run chart function in the photovoltaic energy generating system; and the supervised and controlled data would be recorded in detail and stored into the database for further study and analyses. The experiment confirms the convenient operation of this system that it could effectively supervise and control the conditions of the system.