Abstract
Data acquisition systems (DAQSs) are widely employed with PV plants for collecting all system data for evaluating plant performance and optimization purposes. The main objective of this work is to develop a cost effective DAQS based on Lab-VIEW. The proposed monitoring system has been employed for continuously collecting and displaying the electrical output parameters of stand-alone PV system. Such parameters include; PV generated voltage, current and power. Also it allows drawing of PV panel characteristics under real test conditions. In addition, the global solar radiation can be calculated via measuring the PV module short circuit current since it directly related to the solar concentration. The proposed system is considered as a good solution for collecting the system database to be ready for the analysis and optimization of PV plant's performance. The configurations of software and hardware of the proposed system are presented and the performance of the proposed system is tested when integrated with small size PV system. Field testes demonstrated that the obtained monitoring data are very satisfactory. The online obtained data that displayed on PC screen is very informative. The developed DAQS was found to be very supportive for research and educational purposes. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.