Detection of Malfunctioning Modules in Photovoltaic Power Plants using Unsupervised Feature Clustering Segmentation Algorithm

The energy transition towards photovoltaic solar energy has evolved to be a viable and sustainable source for the generation of electricity. It has effectively emerged as an alternative to the conventional mode of electricity generation for developing countries to meet their energy requirement. Thus, many solar power plants have been set up across the globe. However, in these large-scale or remote solar power plants, monitoring and maintenance persist as challenging tasks, mainly identifying faulty or malfunctioning cells in photovoltaic (PV) panels. In this paper, we use an unsupervised deep-learning image segmentation model for the detection of internal faults such as hot spots and snail trails in PV panels. Generally, training or ground truth labels are not available for large solar power plants, thus the proposed model is highly recommended as it does not require any prior learning or training. It extracts the features from the input image and segments out the faults in the image. Here we use infrared thermal images of the PV panel as input, passed to a convolutional neural network which assigns cluster labels to the pixels. Further, optimize the pixel labels, features and model parameters using backpropagation based on iterative stochastic gradient descent. Then, we compute similarity loss and spatial continuity loss to assign the same label to the pixel with similar features and spatial continuity to reduce noises in the image segmentation process. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was examined on an online available dataset for the recognition of snail trails and hot spot failures in monocrystalline solar panels.