Circuits and Systems, 2016, 7, 3494-3503 http://www.scirp.org/journal/cs ISSN Online: 2153-1293 ISSN Print: 2153-1285 DOI: 10.4236/cs.2016.711297 September 7, 2016 A Continuous Health Monitoring System for Photovoltaic Array Using Arduino Microcontroller P. Pounraj 1 , D. Prince Winston 2 , S. Cynthia Christabel 3 , R. Ramaraj 4 1 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Cheran College of Engineering, Karur, India 2 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, India 3 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Sethu Institute of Technology, Kariapatti, India 4 Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology, Virudhunagar, India Abstract In this paper new technique is developed to monitor the health status of the PV pa- nels in the array. For finding the health status short circuit current is measured con- tinuously over a fixed time period. This technique can classify the health status into four categories such as Healthy, Low Fault, Medium Fault and High Fault. By this classification faulty operation can be rectified and power generation may be im- proved. In case of high faults, PV panels can be protected. The cost requirement for the implementation is very low. The proposed technique is implemented in MATLAB Simulation and hardware. The array considered in this paper is 2 × 2 Se- ries Parallel. Keywords Photovoltaic (PV) Array, Health Monitoring, Fault, Arduino Microcontroller 1. Introduction The increasing power requirements for almost all application areas and disadvantages of the conventional energy sources like pollution, limited amount, etc. in today’s world have attracted the attentions of the solar PV and meeting the power requirements using solar energy as one of the mentioned renewable energy sources has been considered by many researchers. The photovoltaic (PV) generation system is increasing rapidly and showing an industrial growth of approximately 45% per year worldwide [1] [2]. This has resulted in an increased demand for knowledge of PV devices and system perfor- mances. The development of smart grid concept has acted as a catalyst for wide-spread penetration of PV systems. PV systems are expected to play a major role in smart grids How to cite this paper: Pounraj, P., Prince Winston, D., Cynthia Christabel, S. and Ra- maraj, R. (2016) A Continuous Health Mon- itoring System for Photovoltaic Array Using Arduino Microcontroller. Circuits and Sys- tems, 7, 3494-3503. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/cs.2016.711297 Received: April 13, 2016 Accepted: May 5, 2016 Published: September 7, 2016 Copyright © 2016 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access