Availability evaluation of solar photovoltaic systems using markov modeling and cuckoo search algorithm

Abstract

The main objective of present investigation is to evaluate and optimize the operational availability of the solar photovoltaic systems. As the solar energy is a prominent source of renewal energy and contribute a lot in global development having less environmental impacts but the safety and reliability issues of these systems also observed during the operational phase. Availability is an effective tool that is used to discourse the safety and performance issues of renewal energy sources especially solar photovoltaic systems. Here, a stochastic model is developed for solar photovoltaic system having solar photovoltaic plates, solar charger, solar battery, and inverter. The Markov birth-death process is applied for development of the mathematical model of the proposed system. The chapman-Kolmogorov differential difference equations of the proposed solar photovoltaic system used to predict the steady state availability of system. On the basis of literature, the failure and repair rates of all components of solar photovoltaic system are considered as exponentially distributed. In addition, an effort is also made to predict the optimum availability of solar photovoltaic system using well-known optimization technique cuckoo search algorithm. It is revealed that, the predicted availability of the solar photovoltaic system is 0.9988799 at population size 60 after 700 iterations. The estimated parametric values of the failure and repair rates also derived. To highlight the importance of the study the numerical and graphical results are presented and shared with the system designers and maintenance engineers.