Faults can occur in the solar PV modules in several ways like extrinsic, i.e., defect created during manufacturing, failure occurring during the design, fabrication, or assembly process (Karmacharya and Gokaraju 2017; Harrou et al. 2019 ).
PV faults in solar PV array results significant power loss, lower reliability, very fast panel degradation, and further risk of fire (Gokmen et al. 2013 ). This chapter presents a comprehensive literature review along with a critical analysis of fault diagnosis and condition monitoring for solar PV systems. Major contributions are:
Although several review papers have investigated recent solar cell defect detection techniques, they do not provide a comprehensive investigation including IBTs and ETTs with a greater granularity of the different types of each for PV defect detection systems.
Electroluminescence (EL) imaging is a fast, non-destructive and established method for detecting defects in solar modules (Jahn et al., 2018, Bedrich et al., 2018, Fuyuki et al., 2005, Abdelhamid et al., 2014).
Faults, defects, and shading conditions in PV array involve detection as a prime computational task. PV faults in solar PV array results significant power loss, lower reliability, very fast panel degradation, and further risk of fire (Gokmen et al. 2013 ).
Detected branding mark (A bright blue circle marks the detected mark) ( b) To diagnose defects in a solar cell, a machine learning algorithm analyses the effective surface of the cell from EL images.