Solar power monitoring system based on IoT technology

Abstract

This paper presented the design of a solar power monitoring system based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The system would gather the electrical characteristics of the solar system such as current, voltage and power at both DC and AC side then send them to the server by a monitoring module. The server contained databases and feature algorithms to perform the data transferring between the monitoring module and the mobile application. The mobile application was designed with features including: sign-up, sign-in, display and graph of solar parameters. The operation of the monitoring system was checked with data collected from December 8th, 2020 to December 12th, 2020. Beside that, the performance of the solar system was also analyzed in MATLAB by comparing the actual power the photovoltaic panels created (P) with the theoretical simulating power (Pmax) at the same moment. The average hour ratio between the gathered and the calculated had the maximum of 0.8 in the period of time from 6:00 to 10:00 and the average value of 0.58 in all the checked data. On the other hand, a common of having low ratios of P and Pmax from 14:00 to 17:00 in all of the obsered days would suggest some obstacle or shading problems at the installed location. These data collection and calculation models could be used as a basis to apply for further research of classification in the performance of the photovoltaic panels.