Author(s)

P. Pounraj¹, D. Prince Winston², S. Cynthia Christabel³, R. Ramaraj⁴

¹Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Cheran College of Engineering, Karur, India.
²Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, India.
³Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Sethu Institute of Technology, Kariapatti, India.
⁴Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, India.

In this paper new technique is developed to monitor the health status of the PV panels in the array. For finding the health status short circuit current is measured continuously 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 improved. 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 Series Parallel.

Photovoltaic (PV) Array, Health Monitoring, Fault, Arduino Microcontroller

Pounraj, P. , Winston, D. , Christabel, S. and Ramaraj, R. (2016) A Continuous Health Monitoring System for Photovoltaic Array Using Arduino Microcontroller. Circuits and Systems, 7, 3494-3503. doi: 10.4236/cs.2016.711297.