Aerial Infrared Thermography of a Utility-Scale PV Plant After a Meteorological Tsunami in Brazil

Aerial Infrared Thermography (aIRT) is a non-estructive and cost-effective method for detecting faults in large-ale PV plants. In this paper, a 1 MW multi-crystalline PV plant-lock that was hit by a meteorological tsunami in Brazil in 2016, is inspected systematically using the aIRT method. The main objective was to validate this inspection technique for commercial application. Various failures like hotspots, bypassed substrings, short-circuited and disconnected PV strings were detected at the PV plant using aIRT inspection in less than one hour. The results have proven that this semi-autonomous method is very fast, reliable and effective for large scale PV plants.