Design and Development of an Online Smart Monitoring and Diagnosis System for Photovoltaic Distributed Generation

In photovoltaic power plants, fault diagnosis tools are essential for ensuring a high energy yield. These tools should be capable of accurately identifying and quantifying the factors behind the various fault mechanisms commonly found in photovoltaic plants. Considering the aforementioned factors, t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inEnergies (Basel) Vol. 14; no. 24; p. 8552
Main Authors Felipe, Thiago A., Melo, Fernando C., Freitas, Luiz C. G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2021
Subjects
Alternative energy
Distributed generation
Efficiency
energy management
Experimentation
Fault diagnosis
Internet of Things
Maintenance costs
Malfunctions
Mathematical models
Monitoring
Photovoltaic cells
Photovoltaics
Power plants
Predictive maintenance
PV data analytics and diagnostics
PV predictive maintenance
smart PV monitoring solutions
Software
software-as-a-service (SaaS)
solar energy
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:In photovoltaic power plants, fault diagnosis tools are essential for ensuring a high energy yield. These tools should be capable of accurately identifying and quantifying the factors behind the various fault mechanisms commonly found in photovoltaic plants. Considering the aforementioned factors, this article proposes an online smart PV monitoring solution, which is capable of detecting malfunctions that arise from accidental and/or technical causes through the analysis of I-V curves, however, without the necessity to interrupt the operation of the system, thus reducing the maintenance cost. Accidental causes can lead to the reduction of energy productivity due to the excessive accumulation of dirt on the photovoltaic modules, partial shading and eventual errors that occur during its installation. On the other hand, technical causes can be attributed to faults found on the photovoltaic modules, which lead to gradual losses in their electric and material characteristics. Therefore, by using the electric characteristics supplied by the manufacturer of the installed modules, the I-V and P-V curves of the operational photovoltaic strings were obtained in real time, compared to the respective theoretical curves obtained through mathematical modeling. In order to validate the proposed online monitoring system and its potential for predictive maintenance application, a field experimentation was mounted in a 93.8 kWp photovoltaic system.
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en14248552