Abstract: “As a key part of Photo-Voltaic (PV) power system, the power converters are easy to degrade and age because of its uninterrupted operations and instability of PV power output, it is essential to monitor conditions of the power converters and diagnosis faults in real-time to avoid fatal failures and improve the reliability. In this paper, a novel model-observer is proposed to monitor the states of power converters, and diagnosis component faults. Residual vectors generated from the proposed model observer can be used for fault detection and isolation. Finally, simulations on the PV buck converter are performed to test and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method”

Keywords: Fault diagnosis, Photo-Voltaic, model observer, buck