Real-time monitoring and diagnosis of organic solar cell stability

The still increasing high-level emissions of CO2 around the world is underlining the importance of wider adoption of renewable energy. With the advancement of new technology and development of organic solar cell, the price of photovoltaic is going down and encouraging large implementation of photovoltaic system. Due to the implementation of solar panels in locations that are often remote, it is very difficult to monitor physically. The traditional method of monitoring solar panels using PLC or SCADA systems is not cost effective. Therefore, with the development of advanced technology, we developed a data acquisition system using Internet of Things (IoT) technology. It is a new cost effective technology used to monitor organic solar cell using open source tools such as Integrated development environment and Thinkspeak. Thinkspeak is an IoT platform incorporated in Matlab that provides an environment to monitor solar panels parameters. This paper proposes a system for real-time data acquisition and remote monitoring of organic solar cells (OSC) incorporated in buildings facades for stability analysis. The system consists of embedded systems and sensors to monitor organic solar cells parameters such as current and voltage and weather conditions such as humidity, temperature and irradiation. The result of the proposed system has shown an efficient method for monitoring solar panels with an ability to display and store data in cloud. Also, during four months of observation the result has shown some preliminary delamination in the organic solar cell with a decrease in output power.