Signal Processing for Solar Array Monitoring, Fault Detection, and Optimization

Henry Braun completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and is continuing as a Ph.D. student. During an internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab working in the computer vision field, he developed a strong interest in information processing and decision making. This interest is reflected in his recent work on automated fault detection in photovoltaic arrays. Other research interest areas include compressive sensing and automatic target recognition and tracking. In addition to NASA, Henry's research sponsors have included Paceco Corp. and Raytheon missile systems. Mahesh K. Banavar is a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University. He received a B.E. degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka, India in 2005, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from Arizona State University in 2007and 2010, respectively. His research area is Signal Processing and Communications, with specific interest in Wireless Communications, Sensor Networks, Distributed Inference, Localization, and applications of statistical signal processing. He is a member of MENSA and the Eta Kappa Nu honor society.

• Introduction.- Overview of Photovoltaics.- Causes Performance Degradation and Outage.- Fault Detection Methods.- Array Topology Optimization.- Monitoring of PV Systems.- Summary.