Controlling of artificial neural network for fault diagnosis of photovoltaic array

High penetration of photovoltaic (PV) systems is expected to play important roles as power generation source in the near future. One of the typical deployments of PV systems is without supervisory mechanisms to monitor the physical conditions of cells or modules. In the longer term operation, the cells or modules may undergo fault conditions since they are exposure to the environment. Manually module checking is not recommended in this case because of time-consuming, less accuracy and potentially danger to the operator. Therefore, provision of early automatic diagnosis technique with quick and efficient responses is highly necessary. Since high accuracy is the important issue in the diagnosis problems, the paper present fault diagnosis method using three-layered artificial neural network. A single artificial neural network (ANN) is not suitable to provide precise solution for this fault identification. Therefore, several ANNs are developed, then automatic control based module voltage terminal is established. The proposed method is simple and accurate to detect the exact location of short-circuit condition of PV modules in array.