Aerostat Powered by PV Cells: Hot-Spot Effect

This paper is about aerostats powered by c-Si PV modules (PVMd) used in aerial surveillance or reconnaissance tethered to the ground and bouncing in the air for long periods. PV cells of the modules are prone to be partially or fully shaded during these periods, eventually delivering hot-spot conditions in the shaded cells. Hot-spot (HSt) are prone to bring to shaded cells operation in reverse bias, even dissipating more energy than the delivered energy in normal operation into the cell and damage are to be expect. The modeling for the forward biased (FBs), reverse biased (RBs) and for the thermal estimation of the temperature of the area under HSt is described and used in the simulations. A simulation results comparison for a module with and without shading is offered and discussed.