A Novel Fault Classification Approach for Photovoltaic Systems

Photovoltaic (PV) energy has become one of the main sources of renewable energy and is currently the fastest-growing energy technology. As PV energy continues to grow in importance, the investigation of the faults and degradation of PV systems is crucial for better stability and performance of electrical systems. In this work, a fault classification algorithm is proposed to achieve accurate and early failure detection in PV systems. The analysis is carried out considering the feature extraction capabilities of the wavelet transform and classification attributes of radial basis function networks (RBFNs). In order to improve the performance of the proposed classifier, the dynamic fusion of kernels is performed. The performance of the proposed technique is tested on a 1 kW single-phase stand-alone PV system, which depicted a 100% training efficiency under 13 s and 97% testing efficiency under 0.2 s, which is better than the techniques in the literature. The obtained results indicate that the developed method can effectively detect faults with low misclassification.