Photovoltaics

When the midday sun scorches the photovoltaic matrix on the Gobi Beach, have you ever thought of what kind of intelligent commanders are hidden in those seemingly silent convergence boxes? In the photovoltaic power station, which has to fight against sandstorms and prevent the PID effect of the battlefield, the industrial computer is playing the role of energy nerve center. Last year in Qinghai a 2GW photovoltaic base, our delivery of intelligent operation and maintenance system has experienced the ultimate test – the face of day and night temperature difference of 40 ℃ and salt corrosion, the traditional controller have downtime, but our wide voltage and wide temperature industrial control platform is relying on the ceramic substrate heat dissipation technology and IP69K level of protection, hard inverter temperature alarm when the milliseconds shutdown protection is accomplished.

Adhering to the new energy industrial control technology, we know better than anyone the “seven-year itch” of photovoltaic power plants. What you may not know is that those environmental monitors mounted on tilting racks not only have to capture irradiance fluctuations in real time, but also have to maintain stable RS485 communications in the midst of EMC electromagnetic interference. That’s why our team of engineers has developed a PV-specific communication stack – while other manufacturers are still worrying about Modbus-TCP packet loss, our industrial controllers have already realized automatic switching of dual-mode communication, which ensures that the power generation data of each string of modules can be uploaded to the cloud in full, even if there are strong magnetic storms in the Gobi Desert.

In a floating photovoltaic project in Southeast Asia this spring, there was a tricky problem: how to make the industrial control computer control the water cleaning robot in 90% humidity environment? The traditional solution is to increase the waterproof shell, but it leads to poor heat dissipation. We found another way to replace the silicone grease with liquid metal thermal pads, which, together with the marine-grade 316L stainless steel housing, not only solved the condensation erosion, but also controlled the temperature difference of the circuit boards to within 5°C. The O&M team was even more surprised by the fact that the I&C machine could be controlled in a 90% humidity environment. What surprises the O&M team even more is the edge computing function – when the system detects a local hot spot, the industrial control machine will autonomously start the string-level MPPT optimization algorithm, and this action, which originally needed to be uploaded to the cloud for processing, can now be completed within 200 milliseconds at the edge.

Can you imagine how PV arrays can be safely dispatched during heavy rain and lightning storms? The islanding protection system we designed for a mountainous power station hides black technology. When the grid voltage dips, instead of simply cutting off the connection, the industrial computer dynamically adjusts the state of the energy storage SOC by predicting the grid recovery time through a pre-trained LSTM model. This hard power of completing GW-level power calculations in 0.2 seconds makes the abandoned light rate of the power station drop by 3 percentage points. The operation and maintenance supervisor can now pull out his cell phone to see the branch current health of each subarray, and those chores that once required climbing up a 5-meter stand to measure have become history.