A Continuous Health Monitoring System for Photovoltaic Array Using Arduino Microcontroller

Abstract

In this paper new technique is developed to monitor the health status of the PV pa-nels in the array. For finding the health status short circuit current is measured con-tinuously over a fixed time period. This technique can classify the health status into four categories such as Healthy, Low Fault, Medium Fault and High Fault. By this classification faulty operation can be rectified and power generation may be im-proved. In case of high faults, PV panels can be protected. The cost requirement for the implementation is very low. The proposed technique is implemented in MATLAB Simulation and hardware. The array considered in this paper is 2 × 2 Se-ries Parallel.