An Arduino Based On-Site Monitoring and Gravitational Search Algorithm Based Parameter Estimation for PV Module

Performance monitoring and parameter estimation of a PV module are challenging because of nonlinear module characteristics and variations of environmental factors. In the existing literatures, parameter estimation is mostly done on the standard test condition or in controlled experimental environment. Unlike that, the PV module is exposed to the natural weather conditions in the Himalayan city of Ravangla, India in this work. An on-site data acquisition system using Arduino™ and various sensors is developed for remote monitoring. A gravitational search algorithm based estimation of the PV parameters is proposed and is validated on a 74 W and a 20 W PV modules through extensive results. The proposed method is compared with the existing literatures considering data sets of RTC France cell, Solarland SLP080-12M, PhotoWatt-PWP 201 and different algorithms [e.g., farmland fertility optimization (FFO), enhanced harris hawks optimization (EHHO), artificial bee colony (ABC), variants of particle swarm optimization (PSO), whale optimization (WO), cuckoo search (CS)]. These results show the suitability and improvements by the proposed method.