Electrical and thermal behaviour of GSR3 type solar array

The authors compare the results obtained for coupled electrical and thermal characteristics of a solar generator in the experimentation done on a representative piece of a GSR3-type solar array in simulated space environment conditions and the corresponding modeling of these characteristics. This work was done in order to study the hot spot phenomenon in solar arrays with silicon BSFR (back surface field with reflector) solar cells when a cell is partially shadowed. Correlations between the electrical and thermal behavior of such cell assemblies observed by infrared thermography are shown and discussed. Local temperatures higher than 200°C have been observed for cells in hot spot situations and for applied electrical power limited to 8.5 W. Large temperature gradients in the structure have also been measured and calculated. No visible damage (under magnification 10×) was detected on the solar cells and the coupon after this test