Development of an integrated data-acquisition system for renewable energy sources systems monitoring

Data-acquisition systems are widely used in renewable energy source (RES) applications in order to collect data regarding the installed system performance, for evaluation purposes. In this paper, the development of a computer-based system for RES systems monitoring is described. The proposed system consists of a set of sensors for measuring both meteorological (e.g. temperature, humidity etc.) and electrical parameters (photovoltaics voltage and current etc.). The collected data are first conditioned using precision electronic circuits and then interfaced to a PC using a data-acquisition card. The LABVIEW program is used to further process, display and store the collected data in the PC disk. The proposed architecture permits the rapid system development and has the advantage of flexibility in the case of changes, while it can be easily extended for controlling the RES system operation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.