An Intelligent Fault Detection Model for Fault Detection in Photovoltaic Systems

Effective fault diagnosis in a PV system requires understanding the behavior of the current/voltage (I/V) parameters in different environmental conditions. Especially during the winter season, I/V characters of certain faulty states in a PV system closely resemble that of a normal state. Therefore, a normal fault detection model can falsely predict a well-operating PV system as a faulty state and vice versa. In this paper, an intelligent fault diagnosis model is proposed for the fault detection and classification in PV systems. For the experimental verification, various fault state and normal state datasets are collected during the winter season under wide environmental conditions. The collected datasets are normalized and preprocessed using several data-mining techniques and then fed into a probabilistic neural network (PNN). The PNN model will be trained with the historical data to predict and classify faults when new data is fetched in it. The trained model showed better performance in prediction accuracy when compared with other classification methods in machine learning.