A HYBRID DESIGN PROCEDURE FOR FAULT DIAGNOSIS IN A PV POWER PLANT

A solar panel monitoring system is an indispensable part and should be of priority in the design of solar power plants to get the highest possible efficiency of solar panels. This paper presents a hybrid PV solar plant monitoring system based on two communication technologies; namely WSN and RFID. The first part consists of multi-sensors (voltage, current, temperature, humidity, dust, smoke, irradiation, and rain) installed on each PV panel. These sensors will collect data from the panels and send them to a cloud database via Wi-Fi modules. The user can log in to this cloud database and display the recorded data in real-time. The second part utilizes RFID as a supporter when the internet is not available. A microcontroller will send data to the local control room in the solar station via Radio Frequency (RF) modules. A panel information detector will be added to this monitoring system to facilitate detect PV panel's history information. In addition, the fault detector software is based on the C# programming language and MySQL database. Some practical verifications of the proposed monitoring system have been successfully obtained from an experimental set-up installed on the existing solar station installed on the rooftop of the building of the Technical Institute in the city of Baquba, Iraq.