System high voltage stress degradation test in various photovoltaic modules and encapsulant sheets

The more and more solar power requirements and balance of system (BOS) cost saving issues, photovoltaic power plants have increasing system voltage, in Europe, for example, the system voltage requirements up to 1000 volts to 1500 volts. Solar module reliability expose to the high voltage stress (HVS) need reassessment. It is well-known that HVS can lower the PV power significantly that means potential induced degradation (PID) effect. However, the effects of the PID and other environmental conditions on module performance have not been included in the IEC qualification standards yet. In this paper we review various PV module type, example MG-Si, poly-Si, CIGS module and encapsulant sheets performance suffer high voltage stress effect. To evaluate module durability in the presence of continuous high voltage we used four accelerated tests to qualify the HVS effect. The first one is under room temperature, 100% relative humidity (RH), second method is room temperature and aluminum foil covered the front sheet, the third method is climatic chamber test at 85℃and 85% RH and the last one is the 60°C and 85%RH with -1000V bias applied to active layer, respectively. The I-V characteristics and Electroluminescence (EL) images have been measured after several time steps to quantify the degradation process of each module. Besides the recovery characterization was also investigation.