Fault diagnosis of building integrated PV generator: A metaheuristic technique

BIPV systems are usually small-medium PV systems spread out over the territory, and whose technical and installation characteristics can be very different. This makes difficult a cost-effective procedure for monitoring and diagnostics. As a consequence, many problems affecting BIPV systems go undetected. In order to carry out an effective automatic fault detection procedures, we need a software tool that is reliable, cost effective and that can be applied on many PV systems. To reduce the probability of happening of such events, a fault diagnosis is an important tool at least to detect and prevent the critical defects. The well-known equivalent circuit one diode model will be used to develop a PV emulator by means of a new metaheuristical technique called ABC-DE either at normal or abnormal operating conditions to remove the damaging cells scenario at the investigation moment under artificial defects creation. After the emulator experimental validation a fault diagnosis technique is introduced to detect and to identify certain defects based on the power losses and the parameters extracted from ABC-DE technique selected on a reference table.