Systematic review of the data acquisition and monitoring systems of photovoltaic panels and arrays

Abstract

Solar energy has increased in its share of global electrical energy production. The increasing reliability of solar energy has positively affected the sustainability of photovoltaic (PV) power plants. A failure in any module in the plant can reduce or interrupt the production of electrical energy, causing significant losses in both efficiency and asset value. Therefore, responding to a fault as quickly as possible in a PV power plant is critical. The ability of the PV plant operator to react to potential faults is directly related to the rapid detection of faulty modules. In this paper, different PV monitoring systems in the literature are investigated extensively from the point of view of the devices and the techniques used to measure PV systems' current, voltage, solar radiation, and module temper-ature. In particular, the communication methods and data acquisition cards used in monitoring were examined. Remote monitoring technologies quickly detect the location of a malfunction in a large-scale power plant. In this context, traditional wire communication methods, today's communication technologies, and the low-cost IoT (Internet of Things) technologies used to monitor the performance of large and small-scale PV power plants are compared in detail. With the advancement of Internet of Things technologies such as Zigbee and LoRa, research on remote wireless monitoring of photovoltaic modules has accelerated in recent years. These technologies are projected to be widely deployed in the near future for the maintenance and fault detection of numerous photovoltaic installations.