Arc fault and flash detection in photovoltaic systems using wavelet transform and support vector machines

Arc faults pose significant reliability and safety issues in today's photovoltaic (PV) systems. This paper presents an effective method based on wavelet transform and support vector machines (SVM) for detection of arc faults in DC PV systems. Because of its advantages in time-frequency signal processing, wavelet transform is applied to extract the characteristic features from system voltage/current signals. SVM is then used to identify arc faults. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with traditional Fourier transform based approaches.