Design of an accurate monitoring system for a grid-connected PV system based on LabVIEW

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method based on LabVIEW software allows to realize an accurate monitoring of a PV system using Agilent 34970A data acquisition (DAQ), our monitoring system is able to measure, analyze and display all informative data of a PV system through an intuitive and user-friendly interface in real time. The proposed monitoring solution has been applied for a grid-connected PV (GCPV) system, as it contains many climatic and electrical parameters to be monitored such as irradiance, temperature, voltage and current of the PV system. The developed monitoring interface of the GCPV system will thus allow recovering, displaying and recording all data measured by the DAQ system in real-time. while the calibration and validation of the measurements by the installed sensors was performed using the data measurements made by SMA Webbox as a reference. The installed monitoring system provides reliable and accurate measurements, especially for electrical sensors installed with very low errors below 0.6%. However, the implemented monitoring system is an indispensable step for the next work on modeling, performance analysis, and fault detection in a PV system.