Project duration from 2017-02-01 to 2020-01-31
Funded by: FFG

Electrical arcing is a potential threat in photovoltaic systems because of high voltages and currents. This particularly applies to serial arcs occurring in systems where cables are defective or have poor electrical connections (aging of cables and components, environmental influences or animal bite marks on cables). The consequence is an increased risk of fire for nearby components due to the fact, that arcing is a massive energy discharge causing very high temperature.

With a soaring number of installed photovoltaic systems and the aging of the system components including the cabling, more and more combustions will happen being caused by electrical arcing based on an exponentially increasing failure risk.

On the market there are several different solutions available to detect electrical arcing in photovoltaic systems. All of these protective devices are specific solutions being optimized for a certain range of components like inverters from the main producers only. Basically all currently available protective devices are designed for a limited number of system configurations. A general solution to detect electrical arcing in DC micro-grids (such as hybrid systems that include photovoltaic modules and battery storages) does not yet exist.

Because of no available general solution for arc detection, this project will deal with the interdependences between electrical arcing and the inverter electronics, different battery solutions to buffer electrical energy, as well as other influencing factors like the cable length of the electrical wires. The result will be a description of the common characteristics of electrical arcs in different system configurations and a general concept to detect arcing. However, any reliable arc detection must work independently of the DC micro-grid specific design and its environmental influences.

A general and reliable concept to detect electrical arcing could contribute essentially to the safety of DC micro-grids.