A Study on Fault Detection for Photovoltaic Power Modules using Statistical Comparison Scheme

In recent years, many investigations about photovoltaic power systems have been significantly carried out in the fields of renewable power energy. Such research area generally includes developments of highly efficient solar cells, advanced power conversion systems, and smart monitoring systems. A generic objective of fault detection and diagnosis techniques is to timely recognize unexpected faulty of dynamic systems so that economic demage occurred by such faulty is decreased by means of engineering techniques. This paper presents a novel fault detection approach for photovoltaic power arrays which are electrically connected in series and parallels. In the proposed fault detection scheme, we first measure all of photovoltaic modules located in each array by using electronic sense systems and then compare each measurement in turn to detect location of fault module through statistic computation algorithm. We accomplish real-time experiments to demonstrate our proposed fault detection methodology by using a test-bed system including two 20 watt photovoltaic modules.

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