Featured in Blooming roofs – 10-2020

The cracks are showing

Finding tiny cracks in a silicon solar cell is not that easy, particularly given that these cracks initially have little or no effect on module performance. But a number of common occurrences in a module’s lifetime can cause cracks to grow, rendering whole areas of a cell useless. And this is increasingly being recognized as one of the most significant risks to module reliability – one which the PV industry is hard at work to mitigate.

By

Mark Hutchins

12 Oct 2020

Image: Innolas Solutions

PVEL’s Product Qualification Program puts modules through three stages of mechanical stress testing, with thermal cycling and humidity freeze tests designed to open up cracks and reveal the susceptibility of modules to cracking after deployment. At less than 200 microns thick, silicon solar cells are fragile by nature. At various stages in production, transport, installation, …

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