Fault detection and diagnosis of grid-connected photovoltaic systems using energy valley optimizer based lightweight CNN and wavelet transform

Early fault detection and diagnosis of grid-connected photovoltaic systems (GCPS) is imperative to improve their performance and reliability. Low-cost edge devices have emerged as innovative solutions for real-time monitoring, reducing latency, and improving response times. In this work, a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is designed and fine-tuned using Energy Valley Optimizer (EVO) for fault diagnosis. The CNN input consists of two-dimensional scalograms generated using Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT). The proposed diagnosis technique demonstrated superior performance compared to benchmark architectures, namely MobileNet, NASNetMobile, and InceptionV3, achieving higher test accuracies and lower losses on binary and multi-fault classification tasks on balanced, unbalanced, and noisy datasets. Further, a quantitative comparison is conducted with similar recent studies. The obtained results indicate good performance and high reliability of the proposed fault diagnosis method.