Design of a DC Series Arc Fault Detector for Photovoltaic System Protection

With the skyrocketing growth in global photovoltaic (PV) power capacity, fault detection of PV systems has gained prodigious importance in recent years. It has been known that in PV system the dc series arc fault is more difficult to be detected than the parallel arc fault. With the proposed technologies of characteristic extraction, filtering, and fault identification, a novel efficient detection algorithm protecting a PV system against the dc series arc fault is proposed. The detection algorithm is realized on an arc fault detector (AFD) based on a cost-effective TMS320F28335 digital signal processor. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed AFD, a relevant experiment PV system is conducted to compare with two commercial AFDs by various testing states. A great deal of empirical evidence shows that the detection performance of the proposed AFD outperforms that of the commercially available AFDs. The research may be of some reference value for similar works in the future.