Improvements in Performance Analysis of Photovoltaic Systems: Array Power Monitoring in Pulse Width Modulation Charge Controllers

Various challenges should be considered when measuring photovoltaic array power and energy in pulse width modulation (PWM) charge controllers. These controllers are frequently used not only in stand-alone photovoltaic (SAPV) systems, but may also be found in photovoltaic (PV) self-consumption systems with battery storage connected to the electricity grid. An acceptable solution may be reached using expensive data acquisition systems (DASs), although this could be generally disproportionate to the relatively low cost of SAPV systems. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop new and effective monitoring techniques which will provide the PV array direct current (DC), output power (P_A,dc), and PV array DC output energy (E_A), thus avoiding the use of sophisticated DASs and providing high accuracy for the calculated parameters. Only transducers and electronic circuits that provide the average and true rms values of the PWM signals are needed. The estimation of these parameters through the aforementioned techniques showed high accuracy for both series and shunt PWM battery charge controllers. Normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) was lower than 2.4%, normalized mean bias error (NMBE) was between -1.5% and 1.1%, and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was within 1.6%.