Detection and classification of faults aimed at preventive maintenance of PV systems

Diagnosis in PV systems aims to detect, locate and identify faults. Diagnosing these faults is vital to guarantee energy production and extend the useful life of PV power plants. In the literature, multiple machine learning approaches have been proposed for this purpose. However, few of these works have paid special attention to the detection of fine faults and the specialized process of extraction and selection of features for their classification. A fine fault is one whose characteristic signature is difficult to distinguish to that of a healthy panel. As a contribution to the detection of fine faults (especially of the snail trail type), this article proposes an innovative approach based on the Random Forest (RF) algorithm. This approach uses a complex feature extraction and selection method that improves the computational time of fault classification while maintaining high accuracy.

DTW k-means clustering for fault detection in photovoltaic modules

The increase in the use of photovoltaic (PV) energy in the world has shown that the useful life and maintenance of a PV plant directly depend on theability to quickly detect severe faults on a PV plant. To solve this problem of detection, data based approaches have been proposed in the literature.However, these previous solutions consider only specific behavior of one or few faults. Most of these approaches can be qualified as supervised, requiring an enormous labelling effort (fault types clearly identified in each technology). In addition, most of them are validated in PV cells or one PV module. That is hardly applicable in large-scale PV plants considering their complexity. Alternatively, some unsupervised well-known approaches based on data try to detect anomalies but are not able to identify precisely the type of fault. The most performant of these methods do manage to efficiently group healthy panels and separate them from faulty panels. In that way, this article presents an unsupervised approach called DTW K-means. This approach takes advantages of both the dynamic time warping (DWT) metric and the Kmeans clustering algorithm as a data-driven approach. The results of this mixed method in a PV string are compared to diagnostic labels established by visual inspection of the panels.