The Impact of Cracks on the Performance of Photovoltaic Modules

This paper presents a statistical approach for identifying the significant impact of cracks on the output power performance of photovoltaic (PV) modules. Since there are a few statistical analysis of data for investigating the impact of cracks in PV modules in real-time long-term data measurements. Therefore, this paper will demonstrate a statistical approach which uses two statistical techniques: T-test and F-test. Electroluminescence (EL) method is used to scan possible cracks in the examined PV modules. Moreover, virtual instrumentation (VI) LabVIEW software is used to predict the theoretical output power performance of the examined PV modules based on the analysis of I-V and P-V curves. The statistical analysis approach has been validated using 45 polycrystalline PV modules at the University of Huddersfield, UK.