Hand Held Data Acquisition Device for Solar PV VI Characteristics Under Flashing Light

Date

2015-09

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Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University

Abstract

A device was developed that is specifically designed to acquire data from a solar panel within this short time frame with the use of a microcontroller. The microcontroller was used to make a portable device that could capture and transfer this data to a computer for further analysis. Circuitry was developed to connect between a solar panel and a fixed load resistance. The voltage across the load resistor, and other internal components would be captured by two microcontrollers to simultaneously acquire data. This data could be then used to illustrate the IV curve of a solar panel connected to this apparatus. Two prototype designs were created for acquisition. The first being larger scale, using an oscilloscope and function generator. The second design eliminated the need for these larger pieces of equipment by replacing them with microcontrollers, and a direct digital synthesizer (DDS) respectively. Experiments were performed on two solar panels under the ideal solar radiation of 1000 w / m2, using different input signals. One prototype using two different oscilloscopes, and one hand held prototype were designed and compared. The results proved favorable as the three experiments gathered similar data to the solar panel manufacturers data.

Description

Advisory committee members: Wallace Leigh, Joseph Rosiczkowski. Dissertation completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering at the Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University.

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