Solar Panel Anomaly Detection and Classification

The number of solar panels deployed worldwide has rapidly increased. Solar panels are often placed in areas not easily accessible. It is also difficult for panel owners to be aware of their operating condition. Many environmental factors have negative effects on the efficiency of solar panels. To reduce the power lost caused by environmental factors, it is necessary to detect and classify the anomalous events occurring on the surface of solar panels. This thesis designs and studies a device to continuously measure the voltage output of solar panels and to transmit the time series data back to a personal computer using wireless communication. A program was developed to store and model this time series data. It also detected the existence of anomalies and classified the anomalies by modeling the data. In total, ten types of anomalies were considered. These anomaly types include temporary shading, permanent shading, fallen leaves, accumulating snow and melting snow among others. Previous time series anomaly detection algorithms do not perform well for real-life situations and are only capable of dealing with at most four different types of anomalies. In this work, a general mathematical model is proposed to give better performance in reallife test cases and to cover more than four types of anomalies. We note that the models can be generalized to detect and to classify anomalies for general time series data which is not necessarily generated from solar panels. We compared several techniques to detect and to classify anomalies including the auto-regressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), neural networks, support vector machines and k-nearest-neighbors classification. We found that anomaly classification using the k-nearest-neighbors classification was able to accurately detect and classify 97% of the anomalies in our test set. The devices and algorithms have been tested with two small 12-volt solar panels.