Fault Tolerant Photovoltaic Array: A Repair Circuit Based on Memristor Sensing

Abstract

Solar energy is one of the most important sources of renewable energy. Photovoltaic arrays are a widely employed systems used to harvest solar energy. In such systems, the presence of faulty cells negatively affect the energy production of the entire array. The design of fault tolerant solar arrays is therefore attracting a growing interest. In this work, we propose a hardware implementation of a fault-recovery algorithm for solar cell arrays. The proposed system detects cells with degraded performance using a memristor as sensing device. With the aim of improving energy production efficiency, the connections among solar cells are reconfigured according to the array health status. The designed system automatically activates spare cells in the segments of the array to eventually increase energy production. The proposed solution can be adapted to arrays of any size and be applied to different types of solar cells. We show through simulations that the solution here proposed significantly increases the energy production in presence of faults.