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Identification, Characterization, And Implications Of Shadow Degradation In Thin Film Solar Cells, Sourabh Dongaonkar, Karthik Y, Dapeng Wang, Michel Frei, Souvik Mahapatra, Muhammad Alam

Sourabh Dongaonkar

We describe a comprehensive study of intrinsicreliability issue arising from partial shadowing of photovoltaicpanels (e.g., a leaf fallen on it, a nearby tree casting a shadow,etc.). This can cause the shaded cells to be reverse biased, causingdark current degradation. In this paper, (1) we calculate thestatistical distribution of reverse bias stress arising from variousshading configurations, (2) identify the components of darkcurrent, and provide a scheme to isolate them, (3) characterizethe effect of reverse stress on the dark current of a-Si:H p-i-ncells, and (4) finally, combine these features of degradationprocess with shadowing statistics, to project ‘shadow-degradation’ (SD) over the operating lifetime …