A wireless metering and monitoring system for solar string inverters

Abstract

The design and implementation studies of a real time monitoring and smart metering system are presented in this study. The proposed design is improved in terms of smart metering infrastructure based on current, voltage, and power measurements. The communication among the string inverter and host PC is performed by the designed ZigBee transceiver system. Sensing circuits are the most significant devices for measuring both current and voltage magnitudes of the systems. The measured data are processed by the microcontroller unit (MCU) and are modulated after signal processing operations for serial communication. Although the transceiver is configured to execute bi-directional communication, unidirectional data flow is performed where the smart metering system transmits data to monitoring substructure. The monitoring software is also implemented in the context of the presented study. The Visual Studio software development kit is used to design and to code the software by using C#. The performed experimental studies showed that the proposed real time monitoring and smart metering system could be exploited to monitor current, voltage and power magnitudes of the string inverters in an efficient way.