Design of Sustainable PV Module for Efficient Power Generation During Faults

Abstract

The design of a sustainable photovoltaic (PV) module with advantages of high power output during faulty and hot-spot conditions is presented. This PV module is designed by incorporating a small modification in the existing PV modules. The cost involved in modification is negligible during the initial fabrication process. In a commercial market, all PV modules have only one junction box that contains terminals from various strings. Bypass diodes and output cables are connected with these terminals in the junction box. In the existing PV module, two substrings are connected in series, and its output terminals are given to the junction box. The proposed PV module has two junction boxes: one at the top and another at the bottom. The top box has top-end terminals of each substring, whereas the bottom box has bottom-end terminals of each substring. By having two junction boxes, the proposed PV module provides an opportunity to remodify the string connections during fault conditions. This research work analyzed the performance of existing and proposed PV modules under faulty and hot-spot conditions. This analysis verifies the sustainable nature of the proposed PV module.