Photovoltaic Array Fault Detection by Automatic Reconfiguration

Dong Ji, Cai Zhang, Mingsong Lv, Ye Ma and Nan Guan
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Dong Ji: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 116024, China
Cai Zhang: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 116024, China
Mingsong Lv: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 116024, China
Ye Ma: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 116024, China
Nan Guan: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 116024, China

Energies, 2017, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-13

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.

Keywords: photovoltaic; TCT; reconfiguration; I-V curve; fault detection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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