Labview interface for data analysis of PV

This paper proposes the design of a Labview interface for acquiring, pre-processing, processing and visualizing data deriving from PhotoVoltaic (PV) plants. Voltage, current and energy of the DC side as well as of the AC side can give useful information about the operation of the PV plant not only if failure is present but also if little mis-operation is. The proposed interface allows also to compare the data of a specific date with another one. The comparison with the data of the same date of a previous year allows to verify the trend of the performances, provided that similar environmental conditions exist. As PV plants are very often designed with several sub-arrays, the proposed interface allows to compare the global data of the plant (for example the total produced energy for successive years) as well as partial data (for example current or voltage of specific sub-array). An application is presented regarding a real PV plant located in Italy and composed by six sub-arrays, each one of them directly connected to one inverter.