Strategies for Fault Detection and Diagnosis of PV Systems

Abstract Automatic fault detection and diagnosis of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems is an important issue in the PV engineering community due to the great expansion of these applications in the last years. Performance parameters of PV systems, such as yields and performance ratio, that can be the base of the system supervision are introduced in Section 2 of this chapter. A review of strategies used in the field of supervision and diagnosis of PV systems is given in 3 Supervision and Diagnosis of Photovoltaic Systems , 4 Automatic Supervision Strategies . Most supervision algorithms are based on the comparison of monitoring data with expected evolution of electrical system parameters obtained by means of simulation. Section 5 describes some models used in the simulation of grid-connected PV systems, parameter extraction techniques, and simulation tools useful for this purpose. Finally, two examples of supervision and diagnosis procedures are described in Chapter 6 .