Fault detection of Floating Photovoltaics due to Mechanical Stress of Wind Speed and Wave Height

Background, Description, Delivery and Learning Objective Due to the supply of eco-friendly energy sources to cope with climate change, power generation using renewable energy, including solar power, will continue to increase. Among the various renewable energy sources, Photovoltaic (PV) power generation has recently been the most active, and production costs have continued to decrease through continuous technology development, and chronic initial defects in photovoltaic modules have significantly reduced.
When installing PV power system, many problems were caused by civil complaints and environmental obstacles especially when selecting installable locations. Installing PV system on the water could compensate these problems., Therefore, power generation could be carried out more independently.
The reliability of the PV modules in Floating Photovoltaic (FPV) systems was analyzed with climate data and mechanical load test was conducted to predict the output. Through the experiment, the type of defects and the changes in output value were confirmed when the defect occurs. In FPV system, various natural disasters like typhoon occurs defects and problems. In that case, it is hard to predict the generated power. Especially, the wind speed and the wave height are important variables that occurs defects in PV modules. In order to check this, the mechanical load test was conducted. The pressure from 2400 Pa to 7800 Pa was forced on the FPV module. The power of the module became half when more than 6000 Pa was applied. With these results, reliability of FPV modules were analyzed. This study presents a direct FPV power prediction using dynamic simulation based on each material properties of PV modules and analyzed the mechanical reliability of FPV modules.