Fault prognostics for photovoltaic inverter based on fast clustering algorithm and gaussian mixture model

The fault prognostics of the photovoltaic (PV) power generation system is expected to be a significant challenge as more and more PV systems with increasingly large capacities continue to come into existence. The PV inverter is the core component of the PV system, and it is essential to develop approaches that accurately predict the occurrence of inverter faults to ensure the PV system’s safety. This paper proposes a fault prognostics method which makes full use of the similarities between inverter clusters. First, a feature space was constructed using the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) algorithm. Then, the fast clustering algorithm was used to search the center inverter of each sampling time from the feature space. The status of the center inverter was adopted to establish the health baseline. Finally, the Gaussian mixture model was established with two data clusters based on the central inverter and the inverter to be predicted. The divergence of the two clusters could be used to predict the inverter’s fault. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated with real PV monitoring data. The experimental results showed that the proposed method successfully predicted the occurrence of an inverter fault 3 months in advance.