Unsupervised fault detection approach based on depth auto-encoder for photovoltaic power generation system

Fault detection for photovoltaic power generation system is a challenging problem in condition monitoring and troubleshooting, which aims to maintain the safe operation of equipment and improve the benefit of photovoltaic industry. Aiming at the problems of frequent failures of photovoltaic power generation system, large amount of operating data and difficult to obtain fault samples, we propose an unsupervised fault detection approach for photovoltaic power generation system via bidirectional long/short memory deep auto-encoder which combines the auto-encoder in deep learning with the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM). Specifically, We first take the statistical feature enhanced as the input of an auto-encoder based on BiLSTM. Then, we build a simulation model of Grid-connected PV system. Finally, we use the operation results under normal conditions to train the fault detection model to obtain the reconstruction error and determine the fault detection threshold, so as to judge the anomalies of the photovoltaic power generation system. We simulate the shadow occlusion fault and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the fault detection accuracy of 0.95 is achieved. Compare with other models, the results show that it could set up better dependence on multi-dimensional data in time sequences, effectively testing solar panel failures and solving insufficient data labels problems.