Simulated, hands-on and remote laboratories for studying the solar cells

There are many studies in the literature related to the introduction in the engineering curricula of simulated laboratories and, more recently, of remote laboratories to extend the area of applications, nowadays limited by the labs endowment and to use creatively the advantages of e-learning. The paper aims to present a solution for the experiments related to the solar cells field. The presented solution combines the three existing laboratories, namely simulated, hands-on and remote laboratories. The solution put together the software applications Multisim and LabVIEW, the hardware NI ELVIS and the SolarLab board developed by the authors. The choice was based on the easiness of exchanging data between software applications, the speed of creating electronic prototypes offered by NI ELVIS, the large number of lab works on testing and characterization of solar cells provided by the SolarLab board and the easiness of performing remote laboratories using the web publishing tool in LabVIEW. The study was conducted within the solar cells course held for students from Applied Electronics, Physics Engineering and for other courses that have as partial subject the solar cells. The results were obtained based on the feedback from students as well as the correctness in performing lab works by the students. During hands-on and remote labs, the students support the idea of combining classical instrumentation, virtual instrumentation and modern tools, such as SolarLab.