A Real-Time Differential Scaling Method for Islanding Detection in a PV system

In recent years, the implementation of renewable energy sources has been growth dramatically due to their numerous advantages. Among different renewable resources, the Photovoltaic (PV) system is one of the most renowned renewable sources due to existence of a great amount of solar radiations that eases expansion of PV systems. Notwithstanding, several types of faults, undesirable islanding, etc., have involved PV systems in great challenges. In this paper, a real-time differential scaling method is developed to detect the islanding events in PV systems. In the proposed approach, only the voltage signal of PV arrays is used. The method is based on monitoring the changes in the voltage of PV array and using it as an indicator of islanding. Thus, if the monitored values exceed a pre-determined threshold, occurrence of an islanding situation in the system will be indicated. The proposed algorithm is not relied on complex signal processing techniques, making it advantageous due to low computational burden for extraction of desired features. The performance of the method is assessed by simulating a typical system in MATLAB/Simulink, and the validity of it is verified.