Quality inspection of a 2.85 MW PV power plant under mismatch loss due to different classes of PV module installed

Abstract

In this paper, the quality inspection of a Photovoltaic (PV) power plant under a mismatch effect due to the use of 18 different classes of PV modules from 5 different manufacturers is presented. The quality inspection has been carried out by three different tests; a visual inspection, an infrared (IR) thermography inspection and electrical monitoring. More than 800 IR thermography images have been analyzed to cover all PV modules installed. Some inverters have been electrically monitored to measure electrical parameters, being the focus of this paper the output energy. A PV plant database has been studied to calculate a mismatch power factor of the PV arrays connected in the measured inverters. Mismatch power factor, hot spots and the output energy of the measured inverters have been compared. Results showed that output energy is influenced by the existence of mismatching. In some cases, compared inverters showed a power loss of up to 10%.