This paper presents the design and practical implementation of a simple active dual‐axis solar tracker (DAST) to track the sun's movement by using fewer components and low‐cost as well. A dual‐axis mechanism is developed in order to tilt the PV panel by two servo motors facing the highest intensity of sunlight captured by LDR sensors, which are placed in the four corners of PV panel. The DAST prototype was constructed practically and tested using a real‐time virtual instrument based on Excel to determine its efficiency. Moreover, a comparison based on experimental results between the energy produced by the proposed smart DAST and a fixed panel shows that the smart DAST produces 36.26% more energy compared to the fixed panel. The proposed active DAST can be easily implemented without possessing deep knowledge about solar tracking technologies and electronic engineering.

This paper presents a low-cost solution of virtual instrumentation to provide a new technique for real-time instrumentation of the PV panel characteristics such as voltage, current and power. The system design is based on a low-cost Arduino acquisition board. The acquisition is made through a low-cost current and voltage sensors, and data are presented in Excel by using the PLX-DAQ data acquisition Excel Macro, which allows communication between the ATMega328 microcontroller of an Arduino UNO board and the computer by UART bus. Hence, the I–V and P–V characteristics, which processed under real-time conditions, can be obtained directly and plotted on an Excel spreadsheet without needing to reprogram the microcontroller. A comparison between this low-cost virtual instrumentation and the traditional instrumentation is drawn in this work. It is found that our solution presents several benefits compared to the traditional solution such as the data can be presented in graphical form in real time. Thus, several experimental tests to confirm the effectiveness of the developed virtual instrumentation system are presented in this study.

Photovoltaic (PV) systems based on multistring configuration are the best effective solution, given its advantages in terms of system availability, reliability, and energy efficiency. In this particular configuration each substring has its own dc–dc converter and a dedicated maximum power search algorithm which increase the cost and complexity. In this article, an efficient centralized global maximum power tracking (GMPPT) algorithm for multistring PV array subject to partial shading conditions is proposed. The algorithm is based on artificial bee colony (ABC) as an optimization approach to provide the optimal duty cycles allowing the extraction of the optimal global maximum power from each substring. In particular, the proposed approach allows significant reduction of the required sensors to only one pair of current and voltage sensors, at the common point of connection of the overall PV strings. The simulation study has been carried out under Cadence/Pspice and MATLAB/Simulink platforms on the I–V curves to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm when several shading patterns occur. In addition, complex shading pattern of a daily profile has been also carried out to demonstrate the GMPPT finding in dynamically variable conditions. Performance comparison against particle swarm optimization based maximum power point tracking algorithm and the traditional perturb and observe method has also been carried out. The obtained simulation and experimental results have shown the effectiveness and a good tracking capability of the proposed ABC algorithm in a multistring PV array configuration under uniform and nonuniform irradiance.