Fault Analysis and Detection in Total Cross Tied Photovoltaic Arrays

The American National Electric Code (NEC) requires the presence of a series-arc-fault-detector in any Photovoltaic installation operating at a voltage greater than or equal to 80V. Therefore, the presence of an accurate series-arc-fault detector that can detect series-arc-faults and discriminate them from Partial Shading (PS) is required. The work in this paper proposes an algorithm that can detect series-arc-fault and discriminate them from PS in total cross tied arrays. This algorithm is based on instantaneous rows voltages measurements.