Automation of risk priority number calculation of photovoltaic modules

Statistical risk analysis on the field observed defects/failures in the photovoltaic (PV) power plants is usually carried out using a combination of several manual methods which are often laborious, time consuming and prone to human errors. In order to mitigate these issues, an automated statistical risk analysis based on FMECA (failure mode effect criticality analysis) is necessary. The automated program developed in this work using MATLAB generates about 20 different reliability risk plots in about 3-4 minutes without the need of several manual labor hours traditionally spent for these analyses. The primary focus of this project is to automatically generate Risk Priority Number (RPN) for each performance defect and safety failure based on two Excel spreadsheets: Defect rate spreadsheet; Degradation rate spreadsheet. Automation involves two major programs - one to calculate Global RPN (Sum of Performance RPN and Safety RPN) and the other to find the correlation of defects with I-V parameters' degradations. Based on the generated RPN and other reliability plots, warranty claims for material defect and degradation rate may be made by the system owners.