Study on performance degradation and damage modes of thin-film photovoltaic cell subjected to particle impact

Creators: Xiao, Kailu; Wu, Xianqian; Song, Xuan; Yuan, Jianhua; Bai, Wenyu; Wu, Chenwu; Huang, Chenguang

Abstract

It has been a key issue for photovoltaic (PV) cells to survive under mechanical impacts by tiny dust. In this paper, the performance degradation and the damage behavior of PV cells subjected to massive dust impact are investigated using laser-shock driven particle impact experiments and mechanical modeling. The results show that the light-electricity conversion efficiency of the PV cells decreases with increasing the impact velocity and the particles' number density. It drops from 26.7 to 3.9% with increasing the impact velocity from 40 to 185 m/s and the particles' number densities from 35 to 150/mm², showing a reduction up to 85.7% when being compared with the intact ones with the light-electricity conversion efficiency of 27.2%. A damage-induced conversion efficiency degradation (DCED) model is developed and validated by experiments, providing an effective method in predicting the performance degradation of PV cells under various dust impact conditions. Moreover, three damage modes, including damaged conducting grid lines, fractured PV cell surfaces, and the bending effects after impact are observed, and the corresponding strength of each mode is quantified by different mechanical theories.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 04 November 2020; Accepted 28 December 2020; Published 12 January 2021. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Nos. 11572327, 11672315, and 11772347], Science Challenge Project [Grant No. TZ2018001], and the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences [Grant Nos. XDA17030100, XDA17030200, XDB22040302 and XDB22040303]. Data availability: The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Author Contributions: All authors discussed the organization and content of the manuscripts. K.L.X. finished the experiments, prepared figures and wrote the main manuscript text. X.Q.W. validated the experimental results and revised the manuscript. X.S. and J.H.Y. validated the experimental results. W.Y.B. revised the manuscript. C.W.W. and C.G.H. supervised the experiments and revised the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests.

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