IoT System for Thermographic Data Acquisition of Photovoltaic Installations

Infrared thermography (IRT) has been widely used to diagnose photovoltaic installations, however, its effectiveness needs to be improved to contribute to greater energy efficiency in Smart Cities. This research shows a solution that creates a database (DB) of IRT information, through an IoT solution that allows the process to be automated and accessed remotely. The functionality and accuracy of the system was validated in a real PV plant through an experiment inducing conditions that generate hot spots obtaining a temperature measurement error of less than 4 $$^{\circ }$$ C. During the investigation, 1.777 thermograms were generated and the ability to detect hot spots due to soiling, partial shading and short circuits in the module was verified. The DB generated by this solution will be used to establish better fault detection criteria for IRT, which is of high interest to thermographers and will benefit the users of distributed PV installations in Smart Cities around the world.