What are solar panel micro cracks?

Solar panel micro cracks, or more precisely micro cracks in solar cells pose a frequent and complicated challenge for manufacturers of photovoltaic (PV) modules.

What is a crack in a solar cell?

Often cracks are named microcracks or µcrack, and all typically indicate a fracture in the solar cells in the range of mm to as small as in micrometres. Both terms usually suggest the same type of cracks where partially fully isolated areas are developed in the solar cells mainly due to mechanical or thermal stresses 3, 4.

Do cracks affect PV modules' electrical characteristics?

It is concluded that the influence of cracks does not always necessarily lead to severe performance degradation; as a result, the impact of cracks on PV modules’ electrical characteristics is controversial.

What is the difference between solar cell cracking and PID?

Therefore, solar cell cracking and PID are different; however, both lead to a drop in the output power of the modules. Cracks are often invisible to the bare eye; the current standard cracks detection method uses Electroluminescence (EL) imaging 18, 19, 20. In Fig. 1, the EL image of two different solar cells is presented.

Do solar cell cracks cause power loss?

This effect is usually ignored when examining solar cell cracks 31, 32, 33. Another contribution of this work is that we have presented the results of the output power degradation of two solar cell samples under the PID test. We have then correlated the power losses of the PID test results with the cracked solar cell samples.

Are solar cells affected by different crack sizes?

Furthermore, we have also considered studying different solar cells affected by different crack sizes (1–58%), which is different from other recent research work 26, 31, which only considered studying PV module-level cracks (i.e., they did not investigate solar cell-level cracks vs crack sizes).