ABSTRACT:

The increase in the global demand for solar energy has raised the problem of reliability of solar systems which depend the various component of the solar power systems. In the hearts of these is the solar PV cells which are mostly installed in places not easily accessible as other components of the system. Stand-alone and grid-connected PV systems may benefit greatly from real-time measurements of irradiance, ambient power, temperature, current and voltage, to enhance monitoring and control. The aim of this work is to design and implement of an intelligent system that utilizes IoT to monitor a PV panel performance.

An Arduino-Uno microcontroller retrieves temperature, voltage, current and luminosity data values using transducers or sensors from the PV panel, these values are processed, displayed on the LCD screen and then sent through the Wi-Fi module to the ThingSpeak cloud-based server. The ThingSpeak cloud-based server is an IOT data analytics platform designed by MathWorks. The data is stored on the server in Java Script Object Notation format using the write API (Access Point Interface) key and the channel ID number and can be accessed on a webpage using the correct read API key. A webpage is created with the aid of a sublime text IDE (Integrated Development Environment) using HTML, CSS and Java Script languages to design the webpage structure.

After implementing the design, the device was tested with 350W PV panel and a 12V/7.5Ah battery as a load for a period of 8hours period and results shown that the PV panel was in good condition.