Photovoltaic Array Fault Detection by Automatic Reconfiguration

Dong Ji,Mingsong Lv,Nan Guan,Cai Zhang,Ye Ma

doi:10.3390/en10050699

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) system output electricity is related to PV cells’ conditions, with the PV faults decreasing the efficiency of the PV system and even causing a possible source of fire. In industrial production, PV fault detection is typically laborious manual work. In this paper, we present a method that can automatically detect PV faults. Based on the observation that different faults will have different impacts on a PV system, we propose a method that systematically and iteratively reconfigures the PV array until the faults are located based on the specific current-voltage (I-V) curve of the (sub-)array. Our method can detect several main types of faults including open-circuit faults, mismatch faults, short circuit faults, etc. We evaluate our methods by Matlab/Simulink-based simulation. The results show that the proposed methods can accurately detect and classify the different faults occurring in a PV system.

Highlights

Solar system installation has increased greatly in the past decades due to the dropping price of solar panels with technology advancement [1]
We augment existing photovoltaic systems structure with fault detection and analysis functionalities. We focus on such PV array faults: short circuit fault, open circuit fault, mismatch fault and power loss fault due to low irradiance
To distinguish mismatch faults from open circuit faults, we find that the short-circuit current of the fault module is larger than 0 for the mismatch fault case

Summary

Introduction

Solar system installation has increased greatly in the past decades due to the dropping price of solar panels with technology advancement [1]. A critical consequence of PV faults is that the overall energy output is reduced; some faults may further lead to fire disasters that threaten personal and property safety. Both industry and academia have been conducting work on fault detection and analysis to solve the problem. Many protection devices [3] have been developed to improve the reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) of PV systems. Engineers typically conduct regular health checks of PV arrays using current-voltage (I-V) tracer detectors [4] to measure the quality of electricity. Regular manual checks are time-consuming, costly and laborious in large-scale systems. PV systems sometimes are deployed in areas that are hard to reach

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion