A NOVEL SYSTEM FOR PHOTOVOLTAIC SOLAR CELL TEST AND CHARACTERISTIC MEASUREMENTS

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Electronics Research Institute, PV Cells Dept, El-Tahrir St., Dokki, 12311-Giza, Egypt

Abstract

This paper describes a proposed system for testing and characteristics measurement of
photovoltaic (PV) solar cells, module andlor array. The measurements are made using data
acquisition system designed and implemented in the laboratory to facilitate the measuring and
monitoring of the PV cells characteristics. The functioning of the software is based on the so￾called virtual instrumentation. This is a non-conventional data acquisition system. The proposed
system can be implemented at significantly lower cost than the commercial one. The dark
characteristics test facility, based on LabVIEW software to design an easy handling Graphical
User Interface (GUI) and use a single chip microcontroller with a serial interface as a data logger.
The system is used to acquire the measured data from the cell under test and transfer it to a
supervisory computer for monitoring and other signal processing. The system also allows the user
to save the collected data for documentation. The preliminary test we have made indicates that the
system proposed here is highly reliable, which allows measuring and monitoring variety of solar
cell, module andlor array characteristics with a good accuracy. So it can be used in trusted manner
for evaluating and documenting the PV systems.

Keywords

ERJ. Engineering Research Journal
Volume 32, Issue 4
October 2009
Pages 429-435

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