Interactive Condition Monitoring System of Photovoltaic Array Based on Virtual Reality Technology

Solar photovoltaic (PV) source has emerged as a promising renewable energy source over the last decade. Intelligent operation and maintenance of PV systems is one of the hottest research topics in the PV industry for enhancing stability and reliability of PV systems. In this paper, a condition monitoring system based on Valve Index hardware platform and Unity software platform is proposed. This visual PV operation and maintenance method is based on virtual reality (VR) interaction technology. Through the design and development of wireless sensor monitoring nodes with STM32 microcontroller, and the application of ZigBee wireless modules, a wireless sensor network is established for multi-node data transmission. A host computer monitoring platform is built and corresponding VR condition monitoring interactive environment of PV array is designed. The monitored data are sent to the monitoring environment via Wi-Fi, and a highly visualized PV virtual monitoring platform is realized. The application results of the condition monitoring system of PV array show that the condition monitoring system has higher visualization, higher interaction of user interface.