Solar Project

Facility Description:

Monitoring utility-scale solar arrays was shown to minimize cost of maintenance and help optimize the performance of the array under various conditions. We designed an 18kW experimental facility that consists of 104 panels fitted with smart monitoring devices. Each of these devices embeds sensors, wireless transceivers, and relays that enable continuous monitoring, fault detection, and real-time connection topology changes. The facility enables networked data exchanges via the use of wireless data sharing with servers, fusion and control centers, and mobile devices. Research planned at this stage includes developing machine learning methods for fault detection.

List of Papers:

  • Braun, Henry and Buddha, Santoshi Tejasri and Krishnan, Venkatachalam and Spanias, Andreas and Tepedelenlioglu, Cihan, “Signal Processing for Solar Array Monitoring, Fault Detection, and Optimization”, Morgan & Claypool, Synthesis Lectures on Power Electronics, 2012.
  • Braun, H. and Buddha, S. T. and Krishnan, V. and Tepedelenlioglu, C. and Spanias, A. and Banavar, M. and Srinivansan, D., “Topology Reconfiguration for Optimization of Photovoltaic Array Output”, Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks, 2015.
  • Braun, Henry and Buddha, Santoshi Tejasri and Krishnan, Venkatachalam and Tepedelenlioglu, Cihan and Spanias, Andreas and Yeider, Ted and Takehara, Toru, “Signal Processing for Fault Detection in Photovoltaic Arrays”, ICASSP, 2012.
  • Braun, S. Peshin, A. Spanias, C. Tepedelenlioglu, M. Banavar, G. Kalyanasundaram, D. Srinivasan, “Irradiance estimation for a smart PV array”, 2015 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE), Montreal, QC, Sept. 2015.
  • Peshin, D. Ramirez, J. Lee, H. Braun, C. Tepedelenlioglu, A. Spanias, M. Banavar, and D. Srinivasan, “A Photovoltaic (PV) Array Monitoring Simulator,” 34th IASTED international conference on Modelling, Identification and Control, Innsbruck, Feb. 2015.
  • Buddha, Santoshi Tejasri and Braun, Henry and Krishnan, Venkatachalam and Tepedelenlioglu, Cihan and Spanias, Andreas and Yeider, Ted and Takehara, Toru, “Signal Processing for Photovoltaic Applications”, Int. Conf. on Emerging Signal Processing Applications, 2012.
  • Krishnan, Venkatachalam and Braun, Henry and Tepedelenlioglu, Cihan and Spanias, Andreas, “A Comprehensive Monitoring System for Photovoltaic Arrays”, Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Applications, 2013.
  • Sunil Rao, David Ramirez, Henry Braun, Jongmin Lee, Cihan Tepedelenlioglu, Elias Kyriakides, Devarajan Srinivasan, Jeffrey Frye, Shinji Koizumi, Yoshitaka Morimoto and Andreas Spanias, “An 18 kW Solar Array Research Facility for Fault Detection Experiments”, MELECON, Cyprus, April 2016.