Characterization of solar cells in transportation

Breakages of solar cells mostly depend on the stresses induced in the process, handling and transportation, and also rely on the presence of defect such as crack or micro-crack. Upon transportation, vibration caused by truck (or airplane) typically induces solar cell has crack propagation and performance degradation gradually, but current research still lacks the obvious evidences of characterization to address solar cell performance during shipping. This work proposed to evaluate the performance and defect coherently in solar cell caused by vibration during truck and air transportation, and observed the abnormal electrical data (P_mpp, R_s, R_sh) and defects such as micro-crack (> 50μm) or breakage. Experimental data showed the breakage rate (breakage cell/ total cell) is 2% only, but degradation rate (abnormal cell / total cell) is accumulated to 6% eventually, that exposed the high potential failure for shipping cells themselves. Consequently, degradation rate is more robust than breakage rate to qualify the quality of cells. In addition, this paper has proposed a new test method to alleviate the reliability obstacles of solar cells, and accelerate the development of cells protection design for transportation.