Efficient Fault Detection and Diagnosis in Photovoltaic System Using Deep Learning Technique*

PV systems are subject to failures during their operation due to the aging effects and exter-nal/environmental conditions. These faults may affect the different system components such as PV modules, connection lines, converters/inverters, which can lead to a decrease in the efficiency, performance, and fur-ther system collapse. Thus, a key factor to be taken into consideration in high-efficiency grid-connected PV systems is the fault detection and diagnosis (FDD). The most well-known data-driven methods are Deep Learning (DL) approaches. The biggest advantage of DL algorithms, in diagnosis, are that they try to learn high- level features from PV data in a high-order, non-linear and adaptive manners. Then, the fault is classified using soft-max activation function. This work therefore presents a comparative study of FDD based DL techniques. These techniques include Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). The DL techniques-based fault diagnosis are implemented using an emulated Grid-Connected PV (GCPV) system. The classification results for the pretrained DL models is exhibited and performance of the models are evaluated.