Comparative analysis of photovoltaic faults and performance evaluation of its detection techniques

Faults detection and analysis in PV system are considered critical for ensuring safety and increasing output power of PV arrays. PV faults do not only reduce output power and efficiency but also lessen the working life time of a system. Most common and chronic PV faults are line to line, line to ground, shadowing fault, and arc fault while less common and acute faults are hotspot, degradation, bypass diode, and connection faults. Event of PV fault detection failures, such as most recent in Mount Holly, USA in 2011 evinced the improvement in current fault detection and mitigation techniques to shrink such failures. There are various limitations in the existing fault detection techniques, as identified in this paper, which may cause misdetection of the faults. This paper is focused on mathematical formulation of various PV faults and lead to the latter's critical analysis in terms of efficiency, accuracy, complexity, and reliability. The presented work also helps to identify nature and causes of occurrence of a PV fault. This research work serves as a special set of references and recommendations for researchers and PV manufacturing industry to improve fault detection prospects in solar PV systems.