solar panel parameters measurement system

This project is designed to measure parameters of solar panels and objective is to measure Voltage, current, power, temperature and intensity of light .Digital display is used to display values of these parameters.Pic microcontroller is used to measure analalog values of these sensors and PIC microcontroller built in analog to digital to converter is used to measure values of these parameters. I have written this article on request of one follower of my blog.You can also ask me to write article you need.

BLOCK DIAGRAM:

The block diagram above shows a solar panel measurement system. Voltage divider is used to measure voltage.I have used polar and not polar capacitor along with voltage divider to avoid fast voltage fluctuations in voltage during measurement. Difference amplifier is used to measure current. Signal conditioning is done by using shunt resistor to convert current into voltage form. Lm35 tempertuare sensor is used to measure voltage of solar panel. Light dependent resistor is used to measure light intensity. Power can be calculated by product of measured current and voltage.

block diagram of solar panel measurement system
block diagram of solar panel measurement system

 

As shown in above block diagram sensors are connected with four ADC channels with PIC micrcontroller. Next I have explained how these sensors works and circuit diagrams of all these sensors is shown below.

Voltage sensor circuit diagram :

There are many ways to sense voltage. But in this project we can easily measured voltage of solar panel using voltage divider. Two capacitors are connect parallel to voltage measurement resistor to avoid voltage fluctuation and avoid harmonics to go into ADC of PIC microcontroller.I have already posted a article on how to measure AC voltage using PIC microcontroller. You can also check this article by clicking on link below:

AC voltage measurement using pic microcontroller

Circuit diagram of voltage sensor is shown below:

Voltage sensor
Voltage sensor

According to voltage sensor formula ,for solar panel of 24 volt values of voltage divider resistors are R2 = 10K and R4 = 2K. The reason I have used voltage divider because the maximum input voltage to Analog to digital converter can never be greater than 5 volt. But I calculated these resistor values according to 4 volt to increase accuracy of  measurement  and to insure protection of ADC in case of greater voltage fluctuation.

Note: DC voltage source is used instead of solar panel in Proteus just for simulation purpose. Because solar panel simulation is not available in Proteus.

current sensor circuit diagram :

Below is a circuit diagram of current measurement circuit. I have used difference amplifier to amplify voltage appearing across shunt resistor. Because current value may be too high and too low in different timings and different voltage will generate across shunt resistor.So it is not possible to use voltage divider as we don’t know the values of current.

Current sensor
Current sensor

I have already posted a article on how to measure AC current using difference amplifier. You can check following article to understand how above circuit is working.

AC current measurement using op-amp and pic microcontroller

Temperature sensor circuit diagram :

Circuit Diagram of temperature sensor is shown below. To know more about temperature sensor and its details go through following articles:

Digital temperature sensor using PIC microcontroller

Wireless temperature sensor using PIC microcontroller and gsm

Temperature sensor
Temperature sensor

Light sensor circuit diagram :

Light dependent resistor is used to measured intensity of light. LDR is a light controlled variable resistor.Resistance of LDR changes with the change in intensity of light. Greater the intensity of light, lower will be the resistance and lower the intensity of light, greater will be the resistance. Change in resistance can be easily measured by converting it into voltage form as shown in circuit diagram below.

Light sesnsor
Light sensor

In above circuit non polar 100nf capacitor is used to avoid voltage fluctuations.

Power measurement :

Output power of solar panel can be easily calculated by product of voltage and current output of solar panel.Because solar panel is a DC voltage source and in case of DC, voltage and current remain in phase and power relation become simple which is just a product of voltage and current. These calculations can be easily done with the help of algorithm/program.

Complete circuit diagram:

Complete circuit diagram of solar panel voltage measurement is shown blow. you can easily write code for this circuit using ADC of pic microcontroller and lcd display for digital display of these values.if you still have any issue after reading this article, feel free to comment on this post. Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog to get updates of new posts in your inbox.

complete circuit diagram of solar panel measurement system
complete circuit diagram of solar panel measurement system

If you want to purchase complete circuit diagram and code of this project, comment on this post with your email address.

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61 thoughts on “solar panel parameters measurement system”

  1. Hi;
    Thank you for all of these subjects, actual they are very useful and give me very clear idea about the topic which I try to design. Would you please send to me the code for the topics which has been mentioned above.

    Best regards;

    Reply

  4. can you send me its simulation,circuit diagram and the most important thing code ,please send me as soon as possible.we are doing solar monitoring project for that we want simulation,code and circuit.
    email id:[email protected]

    Reply

    • To download circuit diagram of solar panel parameters measurement system click on link below :
      http://www.4shared.com/rar/-PValhUNce/ciruit.html?
      I have posted articles on temperature , light , current and voltage measurement separately. you can go through them to write code for this project. Or just combine code of all these sensors to make solar panel parameters measurement system.

      Reply

  6. can you send me its simulation,circuit diagram and the most important thing code ,please send me as soon as possible.we are doing solar monitoring project for that we want simulation,code and circuit.
    email id:[email protected]

    Reply

  11. Bilal malik want showing solar panel parameters measurement system, but he don’t want to share code. If he not want to share code. Why share circuit diagram download link, I don’t understand. he he he ha ha ha

    Reply

  14. I like this project. I am working on solar energy system. Every time I need to use voltmeters and current meters for measurement. This project is very good because this gives additional parameters like temperature and light intensity along with this voltage and current. I will implement this hardware, so please send me circuit diagram and code of this project.
    Thank you
    regards,
    Abhijit V. Padgavhankar

    Reply

    • Yes you can use any microcontroller or arduino you just have to change microcontroller and write code using respective compiler

      Reply

  21. Hi Bilal,

    Thanks for sharing this knowledge with us. I just have a question and I am confused about it. As you said, the 24V from a solar panel (dc power in this case) goes through a voltage divider circuit which will reduce to 4V since the microcontroller cannot take voltages greater than 5V. Does this mean that the output from the solar panel reduces to 4V in total and the remaining 20V is lost?

    Reply

  23. Sir please send me the full code for this project sir. code is not available for dc measurement of current so please send me as soon as possible

    Reply

  31. Hi sir!
    Can you guide me to make this project.
    I need your help in coding section( how to wright code to microcontroller and can you plz send me the code also

    Reply

  32. Hi Bilal,
    Thank you for your helpful information. I have one questions, How is it possible to remove the possible noise from the environmen which has effect on the measurement system. For example, we implement one measurement system to measure the paramteres fo the solar panels. However, we see some noise around 0.7V during night and date on the output of out measurement system.

    Thanks,
    RZ

    Reply

  34. I am working on a similar project….. Would you kindly send me the circuit diagams, simulations and codes on my email please.. I would really appreciate it…… Mainly on solar tracking and monitoring.

    Reply

  36. Hi
    I would like to say thank you for your initiatives and your work, it is such an magnificant project.
    I would be grateful if you sent me the code to my e-mail: [email protected], and
    I just wanted to know if I used UNO Arduino mircrocontroller, would this be useful for me ?
    thank you

    Reply

  44. Hi! Great project! May I ask how do you determine the best value for the parallel capacitors attached to the solar panel’s voltage divider? Thank you 🙂

    Reply

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