Faults Diagnosis And Monitoring Of A Single Diode Photovoltaic Module Based On Estimated Parameters

It is important to understand photovoltaic module degradation and failure for design, monitoring and supervision of photovoltaic system. The long-term reliability of photovoltaic (PV) generators is crucial to ensure the technical and economic viability as a successful energy source. The analysis of degradation and failure mechanisms of PV generator is key to ensure current lifetimes exceeding 25 years. In the present work, brief presentation of components parts, modeling of PV generator and significations or sources of parameters are established first. Next, the analyzing and investigation on relationship between maximum power point and parameters variation are carried out; results from the ARCO Solar M75 array at NOCT prove that changes on maximum power are related to parameters variation. The estimation of the PV generator model parameters could then lead to accomplish a diagnostic tool and to estimate several factors that affect the health state of a PV generator; in this context, fault diagnosis and monitoring method based on parameters is developed; maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is used as method for extracting parameters from the ARCO Solar M75 array at NOCT (in years 1990,2001 and 2010) and then residuals on all parameters are generated for establishing deviation on same parameters for these years; the key role of this method is detecting deviation on parameters, which are tied to state of health of PV generator; results prove deviation on all parameters, that means there is degradations and failure on the ARCO Solar M75 array.