Design of a New Photovoltaic Intelligent Monitoring and Control Device

Continuous monitoring and fault detection for solar arrays can increase overall power efficiency and prevent hazardous situations. This paper proposes an intelligent monitoring and control device (IMCD) that can measure relevant photovoltaic (PV) parameters such as temperature, voltage, current, and irradiance. Our system design is based on an Arduino microcontroller that acquires and processes data from a PV panel. The design is such that data collected from the PV panels can be processed locally and then transmitted to a networked computer using an integrated Zigbee wireless transceiver. The design has provisions for embedded machine learning (ML) and then cloud-based ML algorithms trained to detect and classify PV faults in real time. The IMCD design can reconfigure the connection topology of a PV array using relays. These relays can switch from series to parallel connection upon command and hence reconfigure the PV connection topology to optimize power output for different shading conditions.