Faults Affecting the Control Blocks of PV Arrays and Techniques for Their Concurrent Detection

We analyze the effects of the faults that are most likely to affect the control circuitry of photovoltaic (PV) arrays, that is their Maximum Power Point Tracker (MPPT) and DC-AC converter. Particularly, we study their possible impact on the efficiency of the whole PV system and we prove that they may produce catastrophic effects on the PV array power efficiency. Based on these achieved results, we then propose two novel lowcost approaches for the concurrent detection of the faults most likely to affect the MPPT and the DC-AC converter. These approaches could allow the activation of proper reconfiguration schemes upon fault detection, thus avoiding the detrimental effects on the PV system efficiency due to such faults occurrence.