Tie failure detection technique for total cross tied solar photovoltaic system

Abstract

Partial Shading in the solar photovoltaic (PV) system leads to more power loss due to mismatch among cells or module’s power generation. The Total Cross Tied (TCT) array design approach is employed for Partial Shading Conditions (PSC) to reduce this issue and boost output power. A tie is used to connect the strings and modules in a solar-powered photovoltaicarray. However, external environmental conditions like strong winds and storms may influence this tie to break. The conventional protection and fault identification technique in the PV system failed to detect this fault. The Solar PV system's entire power generation is drastically impacted by this TCT tie connector problem. Furthermore, during PSC, there is a notable fall in power generation too. To address this, a new technique has been proposed in this work which is capable of precisely identifying the tie interconnection fault in the PV array. A line inspector circuit is used to identify and classify the partial shading and tie interconnection fault. This proposed technique is experimentally verified in the 4 × 4 PV array of 160 W. In all the cases, the proposed algorithm exactly finds the tie interconnection failure. When the diagnosed fault is fixed, the PV array's power output is found to rise by up to 4.5 times.