Deterioration Diagnosis of Solar Module Using Thermal and Visible Image Processing

Heon Jeong, Goo-Rak Kwon and Sang-Woong Lee
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Heon Jeong: Department of Fire Service Administration, Chodang University, Mu-An 58530, Korea
Goo-Rak Kwon: Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Chosun University, Gwangju 61452, Korea
Sang-Woong Lee: Department of Software, Gachon University, Seongnam 13120, Korea

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-14

Abstract: Several factors cause the output degradation of the photovoltaic (PV) module. The main affecting elements are the higher PV module temperature, the shaded cell, the shortened or conducting bypass diodes, and the soiled and degraded PV array. In this paper, we introduce an image processing technique that automatically identifies the module generating the hot spots in the solar module. In order to extract feature points, we used the maximally stable extremal regions (MSER) method, which derives the area of interest by using the inrange function, using the blue color of the PV module. We propose an effective matching method for feature points and a homography translation technique. The temperature data derivation method and the normal/ abnormal decision method are described in order to enhance the performance. The effectiveness of the proposed system was evaluated through experiments. Finally, a thermal image analysis of approximately 240 modules was confirmed to be 97% consistent with the visual evaluation in the experimental results.

Keywords: thermal image; photovoltaic module; hot spot; image processing; deterioration (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: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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