Design and implementation of a on-board device for photovoltaic panels monitoring

Nowadays the world energy infrastructure is subjected to a progressive transformation. In fact it is already possible to notice the growing number of distributed small generation units, based on different technologies, directly connected to the power grid. At present the energy that can be produced by the sun and wind seem to be the most promising renewable energy sources. The use of the solar energy requires to optimize the efficiency of the converting chain and to maintain the performances of the system. These requirements highlight the need to equip photovoltaic (PV) plants with efficient condition monitoring tools. In this paper a hardware solution for monitoring system that allows implementing algorithm devoted to check the dependability of the PV panels and to improve the overall system efficiency is presented.