Arc fault diagnosis is necessary for the safety and efficiency of PV stations. This study proposed an arc fault diagnosis algorithm formed by combining variational mode decomposition (VMD), improved multi-scale fuzzy entropy (IMFE), and support vector machine (SVM). This method first uses VMD to decompose the current into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) in the time-frequency domain, then calculates the IMFE according to the IMFs associated with the arc fault. Finally, it uses SVM to detect arc faults according to IMFEs. Arc fault data gathered from a PV arc generation experiment platform are used to validate the proposed method. The results indicated the proposed method can classify arc fault data and normal data effectively.

DC series arc fault detection is essential for improving the productivity of photovoltaic (PV) stations. The DC series arc fault also poses severe fire hazards to the solar equipment and surrounding building. DC series arc faults must be detected early to provide reliable and safe power delivery while preventing fire hazards. However, it is challenging to detect DC series arc faults using conventional overcurrent and current differential methods because these faults produce only minor current variations. Furthermore, it is hard to define their characteristics for detection due to the randomness of DC arc faults and other arc-like transients. This paper focuses on investigating a novel method to extract arc characteristics for reliably detecting DC series arc faults in PV systems. This methodology first uses an adaptive local mean decomposition (ALMD) algorithm to decompose the current samples into production functions (PFs) representing information from different frequency bands, then selects the PFs that best characterize the arc fault, and then calculates its multiscale fuzzy entropies (MFEs). Eventually, MFE values are inputted to the trained SVM algorithm to identify the series arc fault accurately. Furthermore, the proposed technique is compared to the logistic regression algorithm and naive Bayes algorithm in terms of several metrics assessing algorithms’ validity for detecting arc faults in PV systems. Arc fault data acquired from a PV arc-generating experiment platform are utilized to authenticate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. The experimental results indicated that the proposed technique could efficiently classify the arc fault data and normal data and detect the DC series arc faults in less than 1 ms with an accuracy rate of 98.75%.