Digital Twin Architecture for an Automated PV System with Self-Testing Capabilities

The current research presents a digital twin design for a self-testing automated Photovoltaic (PV) panel. The proposed digital twin, designed via Verilog language, is comprised of three main functions that emulate the PV system's data acquisition and solar tracking operations. The automated PV system, on the other hand, is a dual-axis stepper motor model controlled by the main Arduino Mega 2560 Microcontroller Unit (MCU) in conjunction with several sensor modules that monitor temperature, sunlight radiation, Ultra Violet (UV) level, and wind speed in real-time. This study focuses on constructing a hardware design for the axis calibration, wind gust protection, and solar tracking features. Additionally, we advance a novel Reconfigurable Built-In Logic Block Observer (ReBILBO) to evaluate the functionality of the wind speed module which moves the solar panel into the flat position. The experimental results show that the ReBILBO increases the fault coverage by almost 30% for adding 3 XOR gates, respectively 3 buffers to the standard BILBO architecture.