Efficient fault diagnosis approach for solar photovoltaic array using a convolutional neural network in combination of generative adversarial network under small dataset

Accurate faults diagnosis for photovoltaic (PV) array is one of the vital factors that guarantee the reliable operation of PV power plant. Artificial intelligence (AI) based fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) models are promising techniques. In order to automatically extract the faults features from the raw electrical data of PV array and create efficient FDD model with small dataset, a FDD scheme using Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) is designed. The proposed FDD model is consisting of three modules, a discriminator, a generator and a classifier for fault diagnosis. By analyzing sequential PV data in a 2-Dimension way, the proposed discriminator and generator learn the distribution of PV data under various PV system operations. Then they are utilized to generate more labeled samples to improve the performance of the CNN based classifier. Thus, the proposed FDD model can be trained only requiring minor labeled samples. A laboratory grid-connected PV system is established to experimentally investigate the performance of the developed method. The results demonstrate that the designed FDD model can accurately diagnose line-line and open circuit faults.