LabVIEW based monitoring system for maximum power point tracking characteristics of photovoltaic modules

Photovoltaics is the process of converting sunlight directly into electricity. Though expensive to implement, solar energy offers a clean and renewable energy source. When contemplating to use the produced energy from the solar photovoltaic system, it is important to know how much energy can be produced according to the location, temperature and conversion efficiency. Those kind of systems can be implemented by using only one solar panel in the small systems or might be reached to thousands of panels by connecting them together in the large power plants. The delivered energy from the photovoltaic system which consists of one or more photovoltaic panels is dependent on its characteristics. The electrical characteristics (voltage, current) for those systems will be produced according to the received energy from the sun which is the most important factor to evaluate its performance. Using a monitoring system to analyze the performance of the system has the main role to be able to track the amount of energy which is produced by the photovoltaic system in real-time, and to ensure the forecasted conversion efficiency can continue tracking the maximum power point most of the time. In this thesis, the proposed monitoring system is designed and implemented to simulate photovoltaic panel characteristics based on LabVIEW environment (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) using data acquisiton circuit to get the maximum power point of the system. LabVIEW environment has supportive tools which are used to create a multitude of the application in much less time using parallel programming language platform. All data have been presented in LabVIEW's interface which is provided from the sensors connected to a microcontroller unit from the designed circuit to analyze the collected data according to the drawn curves. The results shows that the proposed system has acceptable performance for analysis and data acquisition applications. Keywords: LabVIEW, Microcontroller, MPPT, Photovoltaic, Real Time Measurement