Advances in Technology Innovation (Jul 2018)
Development of an Automated Measurement System for Checking Irradiation Non-uniformity of Solar Simulators
Abstract
Generally, for some solar simulator manufactures, the measurement of irradiation non-uniformity is made by placing a PV cell artificially and point by point on each measuring point on the solar module. It records each corresponding output voltage of PV cell. It is time-consuming and easy to produce measurement error. If either an XY table or a multi-axis robot is applied in this case, it is ot only expensive but also difficult to carry and setup. Hence, an innovative and automated measurement system, which consists of both a self-developed smart robot and a monitoring and control system, is proposed in this paper to solve aforementioned problems. The monitoring and control system, i.e., constructed by a PC and a self-developed LabVIEW-based application program, plays the role of remotely commanding the operation mode of a robot, receiving the irradiance data being transmitted from the robot and calculating the irradiation non-uniformity. Once the irradiation non-uniformity is calculated, some operations are made to adjust the irradiation parameters of the solar simulator such that the irradiation non-uniformity can meet the specification, i.e., 2%, 5%, 10% for class A, B or C of solar module, respectively.
