Failure Diagnosis and Reconfiguration Scheme for Distributed Photovoltaic Converter Array in Solar Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract:
Solar unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are usually confronted with harsh operating environments, and the photovoltaic (PV) converters used to power the solar UAV become more vulnerable. Hence, the effective fault monitoring and post-failure treatment for PV converters are required. This paper presents a fault diagnosis and reconfiguration scheme for distributed PV converter array consisting of synchronous rectification (SR) Boost converters, including a fault diagnosis method for switches by detecting the inductor current and the voltage across switches, and a fault reconfiguration scheme for PV converter array which uses the switches matrix to remove the fault module. The validity of the scheme is verified through experiments on the prototype of the PV converter array.