Design and development of PC-based photovoltaic test and measurement device for photovoltaic quality inspection

Photovoltaics (PV) power plants are very suitable in Indonesia which has an average intensity of solar radiation of 4kWh/m2 and has a practical system and installation. Therefore the number of solar power plants continues to increase, especially in the household scale. But people have a problem how to choose PV that are of good quality. This research was conducted to design a device that can be used to test the quality of a PV by comparing the output voltage and current produced by two PV simultaneously. The surface temperature of PV and light intensity is also measured to determine performance and calculate the efficiency of PV. Voltage, current, temperature, and light intensity are measured using sensors whose measurement data is processed by the microcontroller. In order for data to be analyzed and stored, the data is sent to LabVIEW. The result is that this tool successfully tested two PV with different brands at optimal conditions with the power produced by PV 1 was 51.06 Watts and PV was 45.13 Watts. For a full day performance monitoring, the efficiency of PV 1 was 15.8% and PV 2 was 14.6%.