Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes

of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

Chapter 3

Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes of

CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the common

failures of CIGS thin-film modules using infrared thermography
and I-V measurements. It is organized as follows: Section 3.1
includes the description of PV plant and experimental
measurements. The classification of failures of thin-film modules
and the measured I-V and thermal image characteristics are
described and discussed in Section 3.2. The statistical feature
extraction of thermal images and I-V measurements are presented
in Section 3.3. The analysis of the results and development of the
general classification matrix for fault detection are presented in
Sections 3.4 and 3.5.

3.1Plant Description and Experimental

Measurements
The PV power plant under study is located in the governorate of
El-Minia, Bani Mazar, in Egypt. In the current study, eighty-five
CIGS thin-film modules have been tested and analyzed. As shown
in Figure 3.1,the PV plant consists of four rows, each row is
named with an alphabetical letter (a, b, c, and d), and each module
inside the row has a numbering starting from the number 1. For
example, a1 means module number 1 in a row (a) and so on. The

55
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

defective modules in the plant are known previously. In the

current study, the reported measurements were taken on the 22nd
of March, 2019, at 9 am. Measurements are performed in a shiny
day with little or no clouds.

Following are the conditions of the conducted experimentations.

 The solar irradiance (E) has been approximately 900

W/m², and the ambient temperature Tamb has been 19 °C.
 The wind speed has been 18 Km/hr, and there have been
some fleecy clouds.
 The infrared camera of Fluke Ti32 (thermal imager with
fluke smart view software) has been used for IRT imaging
of PV modules.
The guidelines of thermography testing of PV panels, reported in
IEC62446 [98], have been followed. These include solar
irradiance levels exceeding the 400 W/m2, clear environmental
conditions, avoiding cloud shading during shooting, low wind
speed, stable ambient temperature, checking junction boxes and
all the electrical connections, considering emissivity of PV
panels, and shooting PV panels with an angle of 50-60ᵒ, as shown
in Figure 3.2. Depending on the angles (α and β) and the size of
the object a-b (here a standard c-Si PV module), the effect of
recoded temperature in the thermography image can be
significant[99].

The technical specifications of the infrared camera used in this

study are shown in Table 3.1. For the angle of view between 90°

56
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

and 60° and the image capture from the glass side, the emissivity
value is selected to be 0.85. The IV measurements of a PV
module have been carried out using a variable resistor. The values
of current and voltage vary in steps from zero to infinite
resistance. By recording these values, the I-V curve features are
extracted. In order to reduce uncertainty in measurements, the
IRT photo capturing and the I-V measurements have been taken
three times

Figure 3.1: CIGS PV plant

Figure 3.2: Recommended viewing angles of PV panels during

thermography inspection [99]

57
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

Table 3.1 IR camera specifications

Camera Model Fluke Ti32

Temperature measurement range -20 °C to +600 °C (-4 °F to +1112 °F)

(not calibrated below -10 °C)

Temperature measurement accuracy ±2 °C or 2% (at 25 °C nominal,

whichever is greater)

Image capture frequency 9 Hz refresh rate or 60 Hz refresh rate

depending upon model variation

Detector type 320 X 240 Focal Plane Array,

uncooled microbolometer

Thermal sensitivity (NETD) ≤ 0.045 degrees C and 45 mK

Total pixels 76,800

Infrared spectral band 7.5 μm to 14 μm (long wave)

Visual (visible light) camera Industrial performance 2.0 megapixel

The CIGS module, used in the current study, is TW-SF-W100,

TianWeimanufactured by Solar Films Co., Ltd. The values of the
electrical measurements for the standard module are maximum
power [ = 102 W], short circuit current [ =1.17 Am], and
open-circuit voltage [ = 136 V].

58
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

3.2Fault Diagnoses Methodology

The present adopted procedure for the fault detection and

diagnosis using IRT and IV measurements is shown in Figure 3.3.
The procedure includes image acquiring, image processing,
statistical feature extraction technique, and fault analysis.

Figure 3.3: the present proposed fault diagnosis method

3.2.1 Image Processing

One of the benefits of interpretations of the thermal image by

using infrared thermography is valuable information concerned
with the temperature of the surface. In order to detect/diagnose
potential anomalies, image-processing techniques are required
because thermo-cameras have a low resolution, which provides

59
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

insufficient information. The resolution of the infrared

thermography camera reaches levels of only 640 x 480. In
addition, unclearIRT images give unsatisfactory/insufficient
information about the inspected objects. Therefore, preprocessing
and processing of thermal images of an object are proposed.
Published articles from[70] to[100] illustrate that median or
Gaussian filtering has been suitable to smooth the noise by using
common preprocessing procedures. On the other hand, the
nonuniform heating and the smoothing operators generate
undesired effects during high-pass filtering and Sobel operators as
addressed in [100].

In this study, image processing includes image filtering and

panels reshape using pixel-shifting techniques. In some cases, it is
difficult to obtain enough information from the PV modules’
images due to noise in the image and low resolution, especially in
thin-film images. Many techniques have been used for removing
noise. In the presented algorithm, moving average filters and
multidimensional filters are implemented. The moving average
filter is a common method used for smoothing noisy data. Since
thermal images also commonly exhibit a blurring effect that
appears like defocusing. Many algorithms exist for reducing or
eliminating blurs, such as the use of an un-sharp mask, the
Laplacian high-pass filter, the derivative-based filters, and the
multidimensional approaches [101]. After a series of experiments
on the dataset, the multidimensional filter is used to remove the
blurring effect. Other problems are faced such as the fact that

60
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

captured images of PV modules have different shapes and

segments of deserts and buildings appear behind images. The
reshaping of the PV panels to obtain the output images is
illustrated in Figure 3.4. A general quadrilateral is mapped to a
rectangle (or to another quadrilateral). This defines the
transformation of the whole image. The destination image is filled
by regular scan lines, taking the values from the source image by
bi-cubic interpolation; this has been done by applying geometric
transformations to images. The geometric transformations are
used to correct distortions caused by viewing geometry using
pixel-shifting techniques to reshape that panel into a rectangular
shape. After getting the rectangular shape, the cropping process to
remove unwanted segments can easily be done.

Figure 3.4: Reshaping and cropping of PV images

61
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

3.2.2 Feature Extraction Technique

The classification techniques in this study are based on the

following features extractions, namely, statistical parameters-
based feature extraction and online I-V measurements-based
feature extraction

a) Statistical parameters-based feature extraction

For each PV module, the image moments (mean, standard

deviation skewness, and kurtosis) are calculated [102]. These
are defined as follows:

Mean

∑ (3.1)

Standard deviation

√ ∑ (3.2)

Skewness

∑ [ ] (3.3)

kurtosis

∑ [ ] (3.4)

62
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

where, N is the number of pixels in the image and is the value

of the i-th pixel of the image, is the mean, is the skewness,
and is the kurtosis.

a) On line I-V measurements based feature extraction

Since the thermal imaging is carried out during normal operation
of the PV modules, the features based on electrical measurements
are restricted by the operating voltage, current, and power. The
features are calculated by comparing the operating value to its
corresponding healthy one for operating voltage, current, and
power ( , , and ). In addition, efficiency and fill factor are
calculated as developed in [29], where:

Operating current ratio

= / (3.5)

Operating voltage ratio

= / (3.6)

Operating power ratio

= / (3.7)

Fill factor

FF = × / × (3.8)

Efficiency

Ƞ= × × FF / ×A (3.9)

Where , , and are the operating current, voltage, and

power of the inspected module respectively, , , and are the
maximum operating current, voltage, and power of the healthy
module respectively, FF is the fill factor, is the short circuit

63
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

current, is the open-circuit voltage, is the input power for

efficiency calculations is 1 kW/ or 100 mW/cm2 and A is the
cell area (cm2). As the healthy values for the electric parameters
vary with time depending on the solar irradiation and electrical
load, they could be considered as the maximum operating voltage,
current, and power of all on-operations PV modules Since the
healthy values for the electrical vary with time depending on the
solar irradiation and electrical load, they could be considered as
the maximum operating voltage, current, and power of all on-
operations PV modules. Figure 3.5 represents I-V curves of the
defective PV module and the standard one and its influence on the
maximum power. For all faults , , efficiency and fill factor
are estimated.

Figure 3.5: I-V curves of the standard module and faulty module
(module d11)

64
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

3.3 Main Failures in Thin- Films Modules

Due to the relative novelty of thin-film technology, many failures
have been reported only for very specific manufacturers [13]. The
most common faults that can be found in PV plants in the site
used for this study are as follows:

1. Cell crack
2. Delamination
3. Burn marks
4. Potential induced degradation (PID)
5. Soiling effect
6. Open string (Hot module)
7. Junction box failure

In the following sections, the IR images and I-V characteristics

measured in the present study for CIGS thin-film modules,
corresponding to each of the above faults, are presented and
discussed.

3.3.1 Cell crack

The construction of CIGS is very different from crystalline since

it is constructed by burning the 4 elements onto a conductive
surface with a laser. This can be occurred on a glass plate coated
with metal foil and on a glass, sheet coated with a metal film
(transparent) on top. It produces electricity, so cracks in the glass
as well as in the semiconductor are the root cause interrupting the
continuous current flow [41]. CIGS thin films module is formed

65
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

from cells reach from top to bottom and are connected in series
from left to right (unlike monocrystalline silicon PV modules and
polycrystalline silicon PV modules). Therefore, the shape and the
length of cell cracks affect the output of power causing a power
loss. When the electrically insulated fragments do not transfer the
charging carriers, they will not heat up, remaining cold. The
present IRT thermal image and the corresponding I-V curve due
to cracks that are shown in Table 3.2(a).

3.3.2 Delamination

Thin-film PV modules delaminate from an adjacent glass layer

since it contains a transparent conductive oxide (TCO) layer. The
delamination occurs because of poor cleaning, environmental
factors during the contamination in the manufacturing process,
which causes moisture to enter and thus corrosion appears. The
present IR thermal image and the corresponding I-V curve due to
delamination as shown in Table 3.2(b). Based on the size of
delamination, it can cause a reduction in the short circuit current
and loss or reduction of electrical insulation, when it is near to
the edges of the photovoltaic module

3.3.3 Soiling effect

The soiling effect indicates the power loss caused by snow, dirt,
dust, and any other PV module surface particles. When dust
covers the surface of the solar module, it creates a shadow effect,
which results in power loss where the maximum peak point is
reduced. The Shadow effect may be soft or hard, which affects the

66
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

current and voltage of the PV module [103]. The present IR

thermal image and the corresponding I-V curve due to soiling are
shown in Table 3.2 (c). The effect of shadow due to soiling on
thin cells is completely different from the one of their silicon-
containing structure since there is no bypass diode in the thin-film
module.

3.3.4 Burn marks

The occurrence of this type of failure is due to solder bond

failure, ribbon breakage localized heating from the application of
a reverse current flow. It appears as very hot parts or regions in
the module. Burn marks often result in a high drop in power,
which can reach zero in some cases, and arcs appear. The present
IRT image and the corresponding I-V curve due to burning marks
are shown in Table 3.2 (d). Burn marks are a critical failure since
they affect the module efficiency and it is considered as a
permanent defect; when the burn marks happen, the module
requires entire replacement.

3.3.5 Potential induced degradation

PID occurs when high negative voltages are present in the PV

plants. It occurs at high temperatures, in high humidity, and at
high voltages approximately to the end of long strings. PID
appears in IRT images as heated regions at the negative string
end, and all the modules of such string are affected. The present
IRT image and the corresponding I-V curve due to PID are shown

67
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

in Table 3.2 (e). When the module undergoes PID for a long time,
it will be affected.

3.3.6 Open string (Hot module)

In this case, the modules operate in the circuit, which means that
no electric energy is generated since the energy is converted to
heat. This happens because of a module string that is not
connected to the converter, or the electric connection has lost
leading to a zero electric power output. The present IRT image
and the corresponding I-V curve due to open string are shown in
Table 3.2 (f). All the modules of the open string will appear as hot
modules in the thermal image.

3.3.7 Junction box failure

The junction box (JB) is the container attached to the back of the
panel that protects the connection of cell strings of the modules to
the external terminals [104]. Failures of junction box include a)
poor mounting of the junction box to the back sheet; b) j- boxes
may be opened or badly closed due to the low quality of the
manufacturing process.

68
Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

69
Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

70
Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

71
Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

72
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

3.4Frequency and Significance of CIGS Thin Films

Faults
Many datasets and information are generated from the previously
described inspection procedures. The fault features extraction data
are obtained using the MATLAB® platform. It includes
thermographic pictures, I-V curve reports, electrical parameters
datasheets, and MATLAB datasheet. For this study, most of the
modules have more than one fault. The faults are categorized as
illustrated in Table3.3

Table 3.3 Present CIGS faults categories

Category Description

Type A Soiling

Type B Soiling and crack

Type C Burn marks, soiling, and crack

Type D Potential induced degradation (PID)

Type E PID and crack

Type F PID, crack, and delamination

Type G Open string (HM)

Type H Dead module

The Dead modules are a result of a set of faults like cracks,

delaminations, and burn marks. In order to detect the most
significant faults and frequency of their occurrence that appears in
PV modules, the Pareto chart is used as shown in Figure 3.6. The
chart clearly shows the types of faults and their significance. It
can be observed that taking care of the first four faults (type B,
type D, type E, and type G) will take care of around 80% of the

73
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

entire faults. These types include a crack, a soiling, a PID, and an

open string..

Figure 3.6: Pareto chart of CIGS

Cracks in the glass as well as in the semiconductor (cell layers)

interrupt the continuous current flow, as shown in Figure 3.7(a).
A temperature difference of about 7 ᵒC between the hot region
and the healthy one is observed. In the case of aggressive
breakages, the increase in temperature reaches values of about
15 ᵒC, noticed on the broken module and creating fire risks.
Consequently, the power reduction reaches 80%. In Figure
3.7(b), cracks cause cold area, since no charges are carried. In
this case, the module is called a dead module, since the output
power is equal to zero. In addition, delamination appears in this
study; it has severe effects on the layers of PV modules, and it
cannot be repaired. The effect of delamination on power output
depends on the range of modules that undergo delamination, but

74
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

when observing this, a large number of panels are affected.

When the module suffers burn marks, they appear as a hot spot.
Besides, a difference of around 15 ᵒC is remarked between the
hot spot and the healthy. This causes a reduction in , and
consequently in power production.

Figure 3.7: the effect of cracks on CIGS modules

Soiling of CIGS modules is considered as a temporary failure

mode, unlike cell cracks or delamination, since it does not affect
the long-term reliability of PV systems. Soiling contributes to
reducing PV output by reducing radiation in a spectrum-
dependent manner. Furthermore, the long-term operation will lead
to the emergence of what is called abrasion effects at the glass
surface. The abrasion effects reduce the optical transmittance and
PV output power. The shadow due to soiling for SIGS PV
modules leads to a power reduction in the average of 50%. The
temperature difference compared to healthy modules is on the
average of 5ᵒC. This effect can be mostly removed by cleaning.
PID phenomenon observed in this study results in an increase in
temperatures of about 5ᵒC of the connected modules with
negative string and reduction in .

75
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

3.5 Results of CIGS PV Modules Fault Detection

Features
The results presented in this section include three main aspects.
The first part is related to the I-V characteristics, while the second
and the third parts include the IRTstaitistical features and the
CIGS faults classification matrix.

3.5.1 I-V characteristics

The IV curves of CIGS do not take a specific pattern to determine
the type of faults such as polycrystalline and mono-crystalline
photovoltaic [104], [105]. This can be explained by the fact that
the CIGS thin films module consists of cells connected from top
to bottom in columns that are connected from right to left. In
addition, there is no bypass diode. Thus, if certain cells defect, the
current is reduced while the voltage change is not remarkable.
This can be observed in Table 3.2 (a, b, c, d, and e), where it can
be observed that the open-circuit voltage for all the types of faults
is practically the same. The effect of the fault is manifested in the
current value. When the crack orientation takes the path from the
top to the bottom of the module, the current value is equal to zero
and the module should be replaced. Thus, the classification of
faults using I-V characteristics shall be based on the analysis of
numerical values of measured current, voltage, and power. Table
3.4 summarizes the mean and standard deviation of I-V
measurements of each type of fault since the type of fault and its
area affect the production of power. In this study, the values of
/ , / , / , efficiency, and fill factor are used to

76
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

distinguish between different types of faults, where the subscript

o refers to the faulty module and m to the healthy one. For
example, the mean value of / for type, A fault is 0.586131,
whereas its value for type B and type C is 0.436515 and
0.332564, respectively. In order to classify between faults using I-
V characteristics, histograms of these values are used, as shown in
Figure 3.8. The histogram indicates how the power measurement
of CIGS modules can distinguish between some types of faults.
For example, the power histograms indicate the overlap between
faults of type A and D, as shown in Figure 3.8(a). No overlap is
observed between type C and D(Figure 3.8(b)), and also between
A and C(Figure 3.8(c)), since burn marks make a high drop in
power production.

Figure 3.8: Histograms showing the capability of power ratio of

CIGS Modules to distinguish between some types of faults

77
Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

78
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

3.5.2 IRT statistical features

For fault detection and diagnosis, the statistical feature extraction

can distinguish one kind of fault within the image. However,
when the image contains more than one fault, such as types B and
E, the statistical features fail to detect the fault types. For more
identification, the histograms of the statistical features of faulty
modules are shown in Figure 3.9. These histograms indicate how
some features can be classified. For example, as can be seen in
Figure 3.9(a, b, c), histograms of image mean, skewness and
standard deviation can distinguish between faults of types A, D,
G. On the other hand, histograms of image Kurtosis and image
standard deviation cannot distinguish between faults of type A
and D, as seen in Figures 3.9 (e, g). The statistical features
extraction cannot classify between faults of type B and E, as seen
in Figure 3.9(d, f, h).

79
Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

Figure 3.9: Histograms showing statistical features capability for

classification of faults

80
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

3.5.3 General classification matrix of CIGS faults

Based on the statistical features and I-V measurements, a general

classification matrix for detection and diagnosis of CIGS faults is
established as shown in Table 3.5. The matrix first row and
column of the matrix indicate the fault type. The inner rows and
columns indicate the features that can be used to distinguish
between faults. Taking for example fault type A, and looking
horizontally in the same row, it can be realized that the present
features cannot distinguish between faults A and B. Faults A and
C are distinguished using image mean. Faults A and D are
distinguished using image mean, image skewness, and image
standard deviation. Differentiation between fault A and other
faults can be followed in the same row. Using I-V measurements
can distinguish between faults (B, C), (B, F), and (B, H).
The cells marked by “No” indicate the fault types that are difficult
to be distinguished using the present proposed features. These
include distinguishing between faults (A, B), (B, E), (D, E), (E,
F), (E, G), and (G, H). In general, the proposed analysis of the
statistical features histograms and I-V measurements can identify
modules with more than one fault.

81
Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

82
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

Future work using intelligent techniques is under development for

further classification of these faults. It should be noted that this
study is concerned with the diagnosis of faults of PV CIGS
modules. Maintenance automation of the whole PV plant would
require the inclusion of prognosis techniques for faults associated
with PV generator strings such as open circuit, short circuit,
reversed polarity, and impedance faults. Intelligent algorithms
based on SVM such as the ones proposed in [104, 105] would be
useful for integration with the proposed features of faults
associated with each module reported in the present study. More
research efforts should be also directed to the prognosis of the
hybridization of multiple defects at both the module and string
levels.

3.6 Summary and Conclusions

The proposed fault diagnosis methodology, used in this chapter, is
based on statistical features extraction of thermal images and its
correlation with I-V measurement. The I-V curves of CIGS do not
take a specific pattern to determine the type of faults such as
polycrystalline and mono-crystalline photovoltaic. Thus, the
classification of faults using I-V characteristics is based on the
analysis of numerical values of measured current, voltage, and
power. In order to classify between faults using I-V
characteristics, histograms of these values are used. They indicate
how the power measurement of CIGS modules can distinguish
between types of faults.

83
 Chapter 3 Experimental Analysis of Failure Modes
of CIGS Thin Film PV Modules

The capability of statistical feature extraction to identify modules

with more than one fault has been improved by a careful analysis
of their histograms. A general classification matrix for fault
detection and diagnosis using statistical features and I-V
measurements is established. The matrix is very useful for the
operation and maintenance planning of CIGS PV plants.
However, statistical features have limited ability to distinguish
between faults and detect faults for modules containing more than
one type of fault. Further work on the development of new
features without these limitations constitutes the aim of the next
chapter. The results of this study represent the basis for the future
development of advanced intelligent techniques for faults
classification.

84