Solar Cell Emulator and Solar Cell Characteristics Measurements In Dark and Illuminated Conditions

This paper describes a novel data acquisition system designed and implemented with facilities for measuring and monitoring the characteristics of a PV solar cell, module and/or system. The functioning of the equipment is based on the so-called virtual instrumentation. This is a non-conventional concept, however it does not have the many limitations in other systems. Additionally, the whole equipment can be implemented at significantly lower cost than the commercial one. The dark characteristics test facility, based on LabVIEW software to design an easy handling Graphical User Interface (GUI) and use a single chip microcontroller with a serial interface. The system is used to acquire the measured data from the cell under test and transfer it to a supervisory computer for monitoring and other signal processing. The preliminary test we have made indicates that the equipment we propose here is highly reliable, which allows measuring and monitoring variety of solar cell characteristics with a good accuracy.