Abstract
The design, monitoring, and control of photovoltaic (PV) systems are complex tasks that are often handled together, and they are made even more difficult by introducing features such as real-time, sensor-based operation, wireless communication, and multiple sensor nodes. This paper proposes an integrated approach to handle these tasks, in order to achieve a system efficient in tracking the maximum power and injecting the energy from the PV modules to the grid in the correct way. Control is performed by means of an adaptive Lyapunov maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm for the DC/DC converters and a proportional integral (PI) control for the inverters, which are applied to the system using low latency wireless technology. The system solution exploits a low-cost wireless multi-sensor architecture installed in each DC/DC converter and in each inverter and equipped with voltage, current, irradiance, and temperature sensors. A host node provides effective control, management, and coordination of two relatively independent wireless sensor systems. Experimental validation shows that the controllers ensure maximum power transfer to the grid, injecting low harmonic distortion current, thus guaranteeing the robustness and stability of the system. The results verified that the MPPT efficiency is over 99%, even under perturbations and using wireless communication. Moreover, the converters’ efficiency remains high, i.e., for the DC/DC converter a mean value of 95.5% and for the inverter 93.3%.
Highlights
There are two essential reasons why the use of renewable energy is attractive—environmental protection and the increasing demand for energy consumption
The wireless, grid-connected photovoltaic systems (PV) system has a coordinator node, wireless centralized control system (WCC), which is responsible for linking the communications and receiving the sensor data sent by the Wireless Smart Photovoltaic System (WSPS)
Many efforts are devoted to increasing the energy production of PV plants, which can be monitored to control the proper operation of the system and assess its production
Summary
Environmental protection and the increasing demand for energy consumption. Among the different renewable energy sources, solar energy through photovoltaic systems (PV) is rapidly spreading in recent years as solar farms or distributed photovoltaic systems. To provide the energy from the PV modules to the grid in the correct way, a zero-crossing detector [11] is required to inject the voltage in phase with the grid voltage and guarantee the grid stability [12] and power quality [13] These problems arise in distributed PV systems when a large number of DC/AC converters are connected. ZigBee and Bluetooth protocols have been used in PV systems for the monitoring of currents, voltages, temperature, and irradiance, [20,21,22,23,24,25], providing energyefficient designs, they cannot comply with tight latency and reliability requirements This fact has required the design of a tailored wireless sensor network for the target application based on low latency techniques to achieve real-time monitoring and stable performance of the controllers.
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