Measurement & analysis in PV systems

Data-acquisition systems are widely used in renewable energy source (RES) applications in order to collect data regarding the installed system performance, for evaluation purposes. The aim of this paper is to introduce a system developed for monitoring PV solar system using a novel procedure based on virtual instrumentation. The measurements and processing of the data are made using high precision I/O modular field point (FP) devices as hardware, a data acquisition board (PCI 6023 E) as software and the package of graphic programming, LabVIEW. The system is able to store and display the values of current and voltage, simultaneously trace characteristics (current-voltage, power-voltage, power-charge resistance), present the measured parameters (during the data acquisition) in tables, continuous acquisition and save data into files for future processing.