Automatic fault classification in photovoltaic modules using Convolutional Neural Networks

Ricardo Henrique Fonseca Alves, Getúlio Antero de Deus Júnior, Enes Gonçalves Marra and Rodrigo Pinto Lemos

Renewable Energy, 2021, vol. 179, issue C, 502-516

Abstract: Photovoltaic (PV) power systems have a significant potential to reduce greenhouse gases and diversify the electricity generation mix. Faults and damages that cause energy losses are common during either the fabrication or lifetime of PV modules. The development of automatic and reliable techniques to identify and classify faults in PV modules can help to improve the reliability and performance of PV systems and reduce operation and maintenance costs. A combination of infrared thermography and machine learning methods has been proven effective in the automatic detection of faults in large-scale PV plants. However, so far, few studies have assessed the challenges and efficiency of these methods applied to the classification of different defect classes in PV modules. In this study, we investigate the effect of data augmentation techniques to increase the performance of our proposed convolutional neural network (CNNs) to classify anomalies, between up to eleven different classes, in PV modules through thermographic images in an unbalanced dataset. Confusion matrices are used to investigate the high within- and between-class variation in different classes, which can be a challenge when creating an automatic tool to classify a large range of defects in PV plants. Through a cross-validation method, the CNN's testing accuracy was estimated as 92.5% for the detection of anomalies in PV modules and 78.85% to classify defects for eight selected classes.

Keywords: Solar energy; Convolutional neural network; Fault classification; Thermography; Data augmentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148121010752
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:179:y:2021:i:c:p:502-516

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2021.07.070

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().