SPARK Technology for Condition Monitoring of Solar Power Plants

Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels are more popular in this era of renewable energy. Due to their accessibility and low emissions, their installations are rapidly expanding. Detecting damaged panels poses an extreme risk to the security and long life of solar power plants. Defects in the solar PV panel should be quickly and accurately identified. A single PV panel failure can affect the operation of an entire solar power plant due to the interconnected nature of the many PV panels in an array. In the shortest period of time possible, this research suggests a fault detection approach for PV panels based on the voltage measurement technique. The proposed method is novel because it detects the faulty panel in online mode by using voltage sensors rather than current sensors. Additionally, the proposed method is used to calculate the voltage across each panel using the minimum number of voltage sensors possible. The proposed Solar Panel Analysing and Reporting Kit (SPARK) technology is experimentally verified in MATLAB/ Simulink software.