posted on 2015-06-15, 13:00authored byJ.P. Vargas, Brian Goss, Ralph Gottschalg
Current codes of practice for PV systems lack detailed guidance regarding circuit mismatch, over or reverse current protection and unbalanced operational conditions in large PV systems. Experimental work in this field is expensive and limited by hardware and environmental resources. The available commercial simulation tools do not rigorously model the complex behaviour of PV systems operating under non-uniform conditions. In this paper a detailed cell-by-cell model of large scale PV systems is developed. The parameter set used for simulations is based on real PV modules power tolerance data and the variance in its principal parameters, thus representing a realistic power frequency distribution. The model is used to estimate and analyse losses due to circuit mismatch, analyse the causes of reverse current in the system's strings and its consequences in the system performance and to estimate energy losses due to string's fuses failures.
Funding
This work has been supported in parts by a joint UK India
initiative in solar energy through a joint project
‘Stability and Performance of Photovoltaics (STAPP)’
funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) Energy
Programme in UK [grant no: EP/H040331/1] and by
Department of Science and Technology (DST) in India.
History
School
Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
Solar Energy
Volume
116
Pages
303 - 313
Citation
VARGAS, J.P., GOSS, B. and GOTTSCHALG, R., 2015. Large scale PV systems under non-uniform and fault conditions. Solar Energy, 116, pp. 303 - 313.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/
Publication date
2015
Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/