Automatic solar cell diagnosis and treatment
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Automatic solar cell diagnosis and treatment Alvaro Rodriguez1 · Carlos Gonzalez2 · Andres Fernandez2 · Francisco Rodriguez2 · Tamara Delgado3 · Martin Bellman4 Received: 31 March 2020 / Accepted: 31 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Solar cells represent one of the most important sources of clean energy in modern societies. Solar cell manufacturing is a delicate process that often introduces defects that reduce cell efficiency or compromise durability. Current inspection systems detect and discard faulty cells, wasting a significant percentage of resources. We introduce Cell Doctor, a new inspection system that uses state of the art techniques to locate and classify defects in solar cells and performs a diagnostic and treatment process to isolate or eliminate the defects. Cell Doctor uses a fully automatic process that can be included in a manufacturing line. Incoming solar cells are first moved with a robotic arm to an Electroluminescence diagnostic station, where they are imaged and analysed with a set of Gabor filters, a Principal Component Analysis technique, a Random Forest classifier and different image processing techniques to detect possible defects in the surface of the cell. After the diagnosis, a laser station performs an isolation or cutting process depending on the detected defects. In a final stage, the solar cells are characterised in terms of their I–V Curve and I–V Parameters, in a Solar Simulator station. We validated and tested Cell Doctor with a labelled dataset of images of monocrystalline silicon cells, obtaining an accuracy and recall above 90% for Cracks, Area Defects and Finger interruptions; and precision values of 77% for Finger Interruptions and above 90% for Cracks and Area Defects. Which allows Cell Doctor to diagnose and repair solar cells in an industrial environment in a fully automatic way. Keywords Photovoltaics · Solar cell manufacturing · Automatic inspection · Defect classification · Electroluminescence imaging · Random forest · PCA · Gabor filters
Introduction Solar power is the fastest-growing source of new energy according to the International Energy Agency. Today, Photovoltaics (PV) is the third renewable energy source in terms of global capacity (Masson and Brunisholz 2016). PV employs solar panels composed of solar cells made of semiconducting materials to convert light into electricity. The main component of conventional solar cells is crystalline * Carlos Gonzalez [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruña, 15001 A Coruña, Spain
2
Robotics and Control Unit, AIMEN Technology Centre, 36440 O Porriño, Spain
3
Advanced Laser Microprocessing Applications, AIMEN Technology Centre, 36440 O Porriño, Spain
4
Department of Sustainable Energy Technology, SINTEF, 7034 Trondheim, Norway
silicon (c-Si), appearing with a monocrystalline or polycrystalline structure. Monocrystalline silicon (mono-Si) cells present an octagonal shape cut from cylindrical ingots and an uniform look that indicates high-purity. Mono-Si cel
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