Fully Automated Measurement Setup for Photovoltaic Panel  Performance Evaluation and Testing under LabVIEW Platform

Mustafa Q. Ali; Monaf S. Tapou; Hayder A. Dhahad

Authors

Mustafa Q. Ali University of Technology, Control and system Engineering Department, Baghdad, Iraq
Monaf S. Tapou University of Technology, Control and system Engineering Department, Baghdad, Iraq
Hayder A. Dhahad University of Technology, Mechanical Engineering Department, Baghdad, Iraq

Keywords:

Photovoltaic, LabVIEW, microcontroller, embedded device, phase control, pulse width modulation

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) devices are widely used renewable energy resources and have been increasingly manufactured by many firms and trademarks. This condition makes the selection of right product difficult and requires the development of a fast, accurate and easy setup that can be implemented to test available samples and select the cost effective, efficient, and reliable product for implementation. An automated test setup for PV panels using LabVIEW and several microcontroller-based embedded systems were designed, tested, and implemented. This PV testing system was fully automated, where the only human intervention required was the instalment of PV panel and set up of required testing conditions. The designed and implemented system was characterized by high performance standard with accuracy, precision, and resolution that is good enough to practically test any PV panel of the 12 V and 24 V ratings. In this paper, several simulations run and manually performed testing for PV panels were done to verify the automatically obtained results and those were found to be of good conformity (-3% difference with simulation results, 0.01% with manually taken results).