A Low-Cost Real-Time IOT Enabled Data Acquisition System for Monitoring of PV System

Abstract

ABSTRACT The performance degradation due to environmental factors represents a major shortcoming to the solar PV system making them untrustworthy for dessert or remote plants. Real-Time monitoring systems are extensively required in the remote PV system for gathering all parameters for estimating system performance and optimization purposes. Many existing studies present wired data acquisition systems, using LABVIEW license software, which are costly and not easily accessible. The wired data acquisition systems are accessible only near the PV systems. There are some wireless data acquisition systems, but they depend on license-based software and cloud services. There are very few wireless data acquisition systems using open-access software, which are monitored and recorded fewer parameters at a very high cost. The existing data acquisition systems are either continuously connected to supply or manually controlled, require the manpower to operate the system near the remote PV plant. These issues can be eliminated by using the proposed internet of things (IoT) based data acquisition system (DAQ). The proposed data acquisition system is based on open-access software and cloud service. In this paper, we presented all the design steps of the proposed low-cost data acquisition system systematically, also tested the performance of the proposed IoT enabled data acquisition system (DAQ) under harsh environment conditions over 28 days. Real-time test results revealed that the suggested data acquisition system is appropriate, reliable, cost-effective, and suitable for harsh outdoor conditions for monitoring and gathering operational information of the PV system to assess its performance. The information updated by the proposed DAQ system can be seen from anyplace. The proposed data acquisition system can be controlled (ON/OFF) by using the Wi-Fi-enabled switch according to the requirement. In this way, we can not only save energy by 58% but also save the life of sensors. It has been observed that the output power of the PV module is reduced by 13% within 28 days without adopting any cleaning technique. In this paper, we also discussed the comparison between the proposed and some exiting methodology of the data acquisition systems.