Experimental characterization and simulation of water vapor diffusion through various encapsulants used in PV modules

Water vapor ingress significantly impacts the performance and the long-term reliability of copper indium gallium selenide photovoltaic modules. A cost effective packaging method that can protect photovoltaic modules from the operating environment is critical to their widespread commercialization. Due to the sensitivity of both the copper indium gallium selenide cells and the electrodes to water vapor, they need an encapsulant with low water vapor permeation as well as side sealing materials, resulting in a high cost of manufacturing. Hence, a packaging strategy without sealing materials is proposed with new encapsulant materials. In this study, the overall amount of permeated water vapor through ionomer and polyvinyl butyral encapsulants was investigated and compared with widely used encapsulants such as ethylene vinyl acetate. The diffusion and solubility coefficients were calculated from the experimentally determined water vapor transmission rate in both transient and steady state transport regimes. To understand the permeation mechanism of water vapor through the encapsulant, the temperature dependence of the diffusion and solubility coefficients was investigated. Based on experimentally determined permeation properties, the amount of water vapor absorption and the ingress speed into the PV module under a continuously varying environment were investigated. Ethylene vinyl acetate shows its excellence among encapsulants, when simply considering ingress speed of water vapor (slower permeation), while ionomer dominantly outperforms other materials, when focusing on the total amount of water absorption (less permeation).