PROPOSAL

WEEK 3


Abstracts

The general purpose of the development of solar photovoltaic remote monitoring system is to monitor the solar photovoltaic system by using visual basic. The photovoltaic system will be integrated with the visual basic. The data of the solar photovoltaic system can be configured and saved through the visual basic.

Solar energy is one of the renewable energy widely used in Europe, America, and Japan to generate electric power by using large arranges solar panel. In Malaysia, fuel/petroleum gas used as the main energy source to generate electric power where solar energy can be alternative to replace fuel/petroleum gas by using solar panel/photovoltaic which convert solar energy to electrical power.

Solar panels will be placed at one place to get the solar radiation that comes from the sunlight. The more optimum sunlight will give the more power generated by the solar panel. But how the user or researcher know, how optimum the power generated? This final year project has the answer. The “Development of Solar Photovoltaic Monitoring System using Visual Basic”.

The data collected from the Solar Generation Power Plant or PV House must be monitored in one monitoring station or room. The value of the current and voltage must be read by using current or voltage transducer. Reading measured data, storage data, control the system derive by microcontroller board and to interfacing the microcontroller board through main computer the project use serial port. This project will be the solution for Solar researcher to get the optimum of solar radiation in order to have optimum power generation.

Introduction

The “Develop Photovoltaic Monitoring System Using Visual Basic” is a data logger system provides the real time monitoring system center from Solar Generation Plant/Field, which the main objective of this project is to analysis the performance of Solar panels based on the information display output. The data and information also can be store in the computer for research and to do analysis about solar performance. By applying this project to any Solar Generation Plant it will be much more convenient to users out there to monitor the performance of the Solar. The monitoring system center also is part of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system.

Solar Generation doesn’t know where the best place to get the best performance of the sunlight due to Solar is based on the radiation from the sun. Therefore, there must be equipment that can measure the value of the current and voltage generated by the solar panel. Since there this project comes out and the development of the project started. This project use PIC as microcontroller which is more efficient in term of size required, cost to develop and easy to maintain and handle.

The project also will display the real time of the current and voltage that be measured. The development can allow the customer or user to monitor the performance of the solar panel with their mobile phone.

Literature Review

The idea of this project is to development of embedded GSM system to control and monitoring for agro-tech industry Development Solar Photovoltaic Monitoring System. The concept and the flow and the methods that shall be used are from experience, guidance from supervisor and knowledge gain from the subjects learned at UniKL – BMI.

Photovoltaic power systems are generally classified according to their functional and operational requirements, their components configurations and how the equipment is connected to other power sources and electrical loads. The three principal classifications are grid connected or utility interactive systems, photovoltaic hybrid system and PV stand alone systems. Photovoltaic system can be design to provide DC and AC power service, can operate interconnected with or independent of the utility grid and can be connected with other energy source and energy storage system.

The combination of Visual Basic programming and PIC made the ‘brain’ of the system. The program includes the interfacing programming which use the serial programming, device controller and also the graphically user interface (GUI) for the back end programming.

The visual basic programming handled the flow of data in transmitting and receiving all the data from PIC. For the interfacing programming, we are used the Serial communications that interface visual basic 6 and the RS 232 (3-wires, TX, RX and GND), Half duplex, No handshaking. The Baud rate is 9600 bps/115,200bps, 8 bits of data according to the interface protocol that suitable for the program.

Visual Basic (VB) is a third-generation event driven programming language and associated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model. Visual Basic was derived from BASIC and enables the rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using DAO, RDO, or ADO, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects. Scripting languages such as VBA and VBScript are syntactically similar to Visual Basic, but perform differently.