Monitoreo de instalación fotovoltaica usando bus CAN

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of developing a system to monitor the behavior of solar modules using a CAN network. It is desired to measure current, voltage, and temperature under different operating conditions of a photovoltaic installation, in order to obtain the necessary information to later use it to determine its energy efficiency. In this work, current, voltage and temperature data are transmitted over a CAN network based on devices from the Microchip® family of microcontrollers. The network design is made up of slave nodes in charge of carrying out data acquisition and leading them to a CAN Central master node. This master node receives them, oversees timing tasks and connects via serial port to a personal computer. The programming environment used is MikroC® for dsPIC®. The process of sending the data can be observed through the MikroC® USART terminal, these are saved in a .txt file for later analysis with a scientific software. Experimental tests carried out with a group of commercial panels are reported under two operating conditions: short circuit and open circuit. The graphs are shown, and to validate the information provided by the acquired data, the relationships between the monitored variables are verified considering the knowledge obtained from the literature.