An Irradiance-Independent, Robust Ground-Fault Detection Scheme for PV Arrays Based on Spread Spectrum Time-Domain Reflectometry (SSTDR)

A healthy photovoltaic (PV) array has a specific impedance between node pairs, and any ground fault changes the impedance values. Reflectometry is a well-known technique in electromagnetics, and it could be exploited to detect fault and aging-related impedance variations in a PV system. A fault detection algorithm using the spread spectrum time-domain reflectometry (SSTDR) method has been introduced in this paper. SSTDR has been successfully used for detecting and locating aircraft wiring faults. However, the wide variation in impedance throughout the entire PV system, which is caused by the use of different materials and interconnections makes PV fault detection more challenging while using reflectometry. Unlike other conventional ground-fault detection techniques specifically developed for PV arrays, SSTDR does not depend on fault-current magnitudes. Therefore, SSTDR can be used even in the absence of the solar irradiation, which makes it a very powerful fault-detection tool. The proposed PV ground-fault detection technique has been tested in a real-world PV system, and it can confidently detect PV ground faults for different configurations of PV arrays (single and double strings) and fault resistances (0.5, 5, and 10-Omega). Moreover, it has been experimentally verified that our proposed algorithm works at low irradiance and can detect specific ground faults that may remain undetected using the conventional ground-fault detection and interrupter (GFDI) fuses.