Design and Development of an Online Smart Monitoring and Diagnosis System for Photovoltaic Distributed Generation

Abstract

In photovoltaic power plants, fault diagnosis tools are essential for ensuring a high energy yield. These tools should be capable of accurately identifying and quantifying the factors behind the various fault mechanisms commonly found in photovoltaic plants. Considering the aforementioned factors, this article proposes an online smart PV monitoring solution, which is capable of detecting malfunctions that arise from accidental and/or technical causes through the analysis of I-V curves, however, without the necessity to interrupt the operation of the system, thus reducing the maintenance cost. Accidental causes can lead to the reduction of energy productivity due to the excessive accumulation of dirt on the photovoltaic modules, partial shading and eventual errors that occur during its installation. On the other hand, technical causes can be attributed to faults found on the photovoltaic modules, which lead to gradual losses in their electric and material characteristics. Therefore, by using the electric characteristics supplied by the manufacturer of the installed modules, the I-V and P-V curves of the operational photovoltaic strings were obtained in real time, compared to the respective theoretical curves obtained through mathematical modeling. In order to validate the proposed online monitoring system and its potential for predictive maintenance application, a field experimentation was mounted in a 93.8 kWp photovoltaic system.

Smart Intelligent Monitoring and Maintenance Management of Photo-voltaic Systems

“…One of the salient parts of this study is that the complete six parameters of a typical solar PV was taken into consideration at the design level, for timely maintenance of solar PVs as compared to earlier existing solutions in the literature. In Reference [10], the presented work did data acquisition system for the solar PV system, however, the authors of the paper ended up designing a system that acquires data for solar panel alone. Also, Reference [10] designed a system that monitors solar PV cell and battery parameters, without considering the parameters employed in this current paper.…”

“…In Reference [10], the presented work did data acquisition system for the solar PV system, however, the authors of the paper ended up designing a system that acquires data for solar panel alone. Also, Reference [10] designed a system that monitors solar PV cell and battery parameters, without considering the parameters employed in this current paper. Therefore, the target or unique feature of this research is that it presented a holistic approach to solar PV monitoring and maintenance while integrating IoT technology in the analytic.…”

“…The method aimed at detecting hotspot faults on PV panels by the combination of thermography, Global Position System (GPS) positioning and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). An online smart solar PV monitoring system was suggested in [10], for the analyses of Voltage Current (VI) curves, in order to identify failures caused by technical or unintentional factors without interrupting the solar PVs during operation, thus, mitigating the maintenance costs involved in the process.…”