A DC Arc Fault Detection Method Based on AR Model for Photovoltaic Systems

DC arc faults are dangerous to photovoltaic (PV) systems and can cause serious electric fire hazards and property damage. Because the PV inverter works in a high-frequency pulse width modulation (PWM) control mode, the arc fault detection is prone to nuisance tripping due to PV inverter noises. An arc fault detection method based on the autoregressive (AR) model is proposed. A test platform collects the database of this research according to the UL1699B standard, in which three different types of PV inverters are taken into consideration to make it more generalized. The arc current can be considered a nonstationary random signal while the noise of the PV inverter is not. According to the difference in randomness features between an arc and the noise, a detection method based on the AR model is proposed. The Burg algorithm is used to determine model coefficients, while the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) is applied to explore the best order of the proposed model. The correlation coefficient difference of the model coefficients plays a role as a criterion to identify if there is an arc fault. Moreover, a prototype circuit based on the TMS320F28033 MCU is built for algorithm verification. Test results show that the proposed algorithm can identify an arc fault without a false positive under different PV inverter conditions. The fault clearing time is between 60 ms to 80 ms, which can meet the requirement of 200 ms specified by the standard.