Development of data acquisition system for hybrid power plant

In this paper, the data acquisition system is developed to monitor the wind speed, solar irradiation, and PV temperature based on a low-cost AVR microcontroller. Instead of using an expensive pyranometer, a low-cost PV module is used as the solar irradiation sensor. The integrated-circuit temperature sensor LM35 and a cup-type anemometer are used to measure the temperature and the wind speed respectively. To provide the flexibility of the data acquisition system, the Modbus protocol is adopted for communicating with other monitoring software or HMI. This feature enables the system to communicate with SCADA system. It provides useful information about the environment conditions for operating the hybrid power system effectively. The developed data acquisition system is tested in real environment and comparisons to the standard measurement instruments are conducted. The measurement errors of 4.46% 3.45%, and 3.47% are obtained for the wind speed, solar irradiation, and PV temperature measurement respectively.