Abstract

In this paper, a distributed on-line monitoring system based on a two-level wireless sensor network (WSN) is proposed for real time status monitoring of photovoltaic (PV) arrays to support the fine management and maintenance of PV power plants. The system includes the sensing nodes installed on PV modules (PVM), sensing and routing nodes installed on combiner boxes of PV sub-arrays (PVA), a sink node and a data management centre (DMC) running on a host computer. The first level WSN is implemented by the low-cost wireless transceiver nRF24L01, and it is used to achieve single hop communication between the PVM nodes and their corresponding PVA nodes. The second level WSN is realized by the CC2530 based ZigBee network for multi-hop communication among PVA nodes and the sink node. The PVM nodes are used to monitor the PVM working voltage and backplane temperature, and they send the acquired data to their PVA node via the nRF24L01 based first level WSN. The PVA nodes are used to monitor the array voltage, PV string current and environment irradiance, and they send the acquired and received data to the DMC via the ZigBee based second level WSN. The DMC is designed using the MATLAB GUIDE and MySQL database. Laboratory experiment results show that the system can effectively acquire, display, store and manage the operating and environment parameters of PVA in real time.

Details

Title
A distributed monitoring system for photovoltaic arrays based on a two-level wireless sensor network
Author
Su, F P 1 ; Chen, Z C 1 ; Zhou, H F 1 ; Wu, L J 1 ; Lin, P J 1 ; Cheng, S Y 1 ; Li, Y F 1 

 Institute of Micro/Nano Devices and Solar Cells, College of Physics and Information Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, China; Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Centre of Photovoltaic Science and Engineering, 213164 Changzhou, China 
Publication year
2017
Publication date
Nov 2017
Publisher
IOP Publishing
ISSN
17551307
e-ISSN
17551315
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2548666792
Copyright
© 2017. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.