Zigbee Based Data Acqusition System for Monitoring Photovoltaic System

ZIGBEE BASED DATA ACQUSITION SYSTEM FOR          

MONITORING PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEM

BY S.SANKARALINGAM, S.T.SIDDHARTHAN, M.NAGENDRAN,

ABSTRACT:

Systems that convert the sunlight into electrical energy like photovoltaic (PV) have been becoming   widespread   worldwide. The prospect of using the promising technology of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the field of PV plant supervising and monitoring is studied here. The knowledge of the status  and  good  working  condition of  each  PV  module  separately  as well as of any PV system component will lead in a more efficient way for power  management.  The nature of the wireless sensor networks (WSN) offers several advantages on monitoring and controlling applications over other traditional technologies including selfhealing, self-organization and flexibility.

          KEY         WORDS-photovoltaic,         data       acquisition system, pv monitoring, control, zigbee and gsm modem

1. INTRODUCTION

   ZigBee  technology  that  is based  on  the  

IEEE  802.15.4 standard, is used here to offer its maximum advantages on a system that is capable for real time measurements  and  event  alert.  In this paper, the monitoring of photovoltaic arrays with the ZigBee technology will be helpful in reduction of man labor and does the transmission with wireless sensor networks (WSN), therefore there no need of any cables for transmission and the transmission would be uninterrupted mainly.

As the GSM modem is also used in our protocol, so that we could authority of knowing the present measurements of voltage, current, and temperature at the particular time.  The GSM modem has the capacity to receive instructions / commands from its two registered clients. The GSM modem has been programmed to send and receive instructions to the clients within the range of 500 metres.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW

    In order to develop an effective yet low cost monitoring system, a number of previous works, which are related to solar energy monitoring system, have been reviewed and summarized. Even though the focus here is on grid- connected PV system, monitoring systems for similar applications such as weather station, stand-alone PV system as well as hybrid systems are also included, to gain a better picture on this area of work.

Based on the surveyed literature, the main characteristics of these monitoring systems are categorized into six main aspects, i.e. the data transfer mechanism, controller, monitored parameters, sampling intervals, program development software and monitoring method.

In terms of data transfer mechanism, both wired and wireless systems have been introduced in the past. For wired systems, data transmissions are usually done using RS232 cable or RS485 cable (Ayompe, Duffy, McCormack, & Conlon, 2011), with the monitoring systems being PC-based [1]. As mentioned earlier, wired systems have their limitations, and are considered less favorable than the wireless option for the monitoring of a solar energy conversion system.