Recent Advances in Solar Photovoltaic Protection

Dear Colleagues,

Recently, there has been a rapidly growing trend towards the use of photovoltaic (PV) solar energy generation as a clean and easy-to-access energy source. As most PV components work in open environments, they are constantly subjected to environmental damage, including the destructive effects of chronic exposure to sunlight, dust, etc. This eventually leads to the improper operation of a PV system due to various faults and failures that can be either electrical, such as unintentional connections between two points with different voltage levels, or non-electrical, such as gradual cell or module degradation over a certain period of constant operation. The results can vary from a relative power loss in PV systems to catastrophic consequences, such as fire hazards. Hence, the protection of PV components is of particular importance.

Protection has conventionally been carried out using various electromechanical protection relays such as an overcurrent protection device (OCPD), a ground fault detector/interrupter (GFDI), a residual current device (RCD), an arc fault circuit interrupter (AFCI), etc. However, the performance of conventional electromechanical protection devices has proven to be unreliable when dealing with critical fault detection conditions. Consequently, an advanced automatic fault protection scheme is required to be able to protect the system against a wide range of faults in either critical or uncritical conditions.

Therefore, this Special Issue aims to publish high-quality papers on recent advances in the field of PV system protection, including the integration of artificial intelligence, digital twins, the Internet of things, etc. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, PV system fault detection, photovoltaic digital twin modelling, PV system predictive and preventive protection, PV system resilience and restoration, and recent techniques in photovoltaic feature engineering.

Prof. Dr. Mohammadreza Aghaei
Dr. Aref Eskandari
Guest Editors

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