LabVIEW based monitoring system applied for PV power station

The monitoring system in photovoltaic (PV) power plants is very important and urgent in some cases for analyzing, troubleshooting and in decision making issues. This paper proposes very simple, low cost, high reliability, and high precision PV monitoring system. The proposed system is composed of a laptop connected to very cheap microcontroller board via serial cable. All the sensors and actuators are emulated in a prototype board that interfaced to the microcontroller system. A graphical user interface (GUI) program is developed in LabVIEW to monitor all the collected data in the laptop monitor and controls the system actuators via the microcontroller. An assembly program is written on the microcontroller board to scan and acquire all required data from sensors, transfer it to laptop for monitoring and then storing it for PV system documentation. The experimental results show that the proposed monitoring system is very robust and the control signals are very accurate. The system is very reliable, precise, cheap and more flexible for use in large scale photovoltaic power plant monitoring.