Fault diagnosis method of photovoltaic array based on support vector machine

Photovoltaic (PV) arrays are prone to various faults due to the hostile working environment. This paper presents the fault diagnosis algorithm based on support vector machine (SVM) to detect short circuit, open circuit, and lack of irradiation faults that occurred in PV arrays. By analyzing these faults and I-V characteristic curves of PV arrays, the short-circuit current, open-circuit voltage, maximum-power current, and maximum-power voltage are chosen as input parameters of SVM-based fault diagnosis algorithm. The data preprocessing methods are used to improve the quality of fault data set considering the effects of the quality on the performance of SVM-based fault diagnosis algorithm. The grid search and k-fold cross-validation methods are proposed to optimize the parameters of the SVM-based fault diagnosis algorithm. It gets test accuracy of 97% by testing the trained SVM-based fault diagnosis algorithm with 400 data. The experimental results indicate that the SVM-based fault diagnosis algorithm has higher accuracy and generalization ability than other algorithm for fault diagnosis of PV arrays.