Photovoltaic panel hidden crack inspection

Can El imaging detect cracks in solar cells?

According to Fig. 9, a solar cell sample has been observed using EL imaging technique. As noticed, multiple cracks appear in the EL image, where in fact, the detection of the cracks have been improved using the proposed algorithm.

Can photoluminescence imaging detect cracked solar cells?

Our method is reliant on the detection of an EL image for cracked solar cell samples, while we did not use the Photoluminescence (PL) imaging technique as it is ideally used to inspect solar cells purity and crystalline quality for quantification of the amount of disorder to the purities in the materials.

How do crack defects affect PV panels?

Crack defects can cause electrode breakage and then obstruct collection and transmission of current, which is easy to form hot spots or fragments and finally affects the stability of PV panel [ 2, 3, 4 ]. Therefore, the detection of crack defects is very critical.

How much power is lost if a solar panel is cracked?

Different researches have shown that the loss in the output power is permanently greater than 2.5% due to the presence of micro cracks [ , , ]. On the other hand, the case study done by Dhimish et al. [ 10] approves that the maximum power loss is equal to 20% for PV modules affected by multiple micro cracked solar cells.

Can IR camera detect micro cracks in solar cells?

This method can identify the noninvasive and nondestructive regions of the inspected solar cell samples. Main limitations associated with this method that is has to use a high-resolution IR camera, and there is no evidence that this technique would identify micro cracks in the range of 100 μm.

Can yolov7 model detect small-sized PV cell cracks?

The experiments are conducted on PV cell crack dataset. The proposed YOLOv7 model is compared with baseline YOLOv7, YOLOv5-s, YOLOv5-m, YOLOv5-l, and YOLOv5-x. The obtained results validate the effectiveness of the improved YOLOv7 model in detecting small-sized PV cell cracks.