Intelligent Classification of Silicon Photovoltaic Cell Defects Based on Eddy Current Thermography and Convolution Neural Network

In this article, defects in the production process of silicon photovoltaic (Si-PV) cells are urgently needed to be detected due to their serious impact on the normal generation of PV system. In view of the shortcomings, such as low-defect efficiency, few detection data, and high detection error rate in the existing industrial production line, the main research purpose of this article is to complete an intelligent classification method for efficient and innovative defect detection for Si-PV cells and modules. The purpose is to improve the detection efficiency of Si-PV cell, to ensure the safety and reliability of Si-PV cell production process, to achieve large number of Si-PV cell defects detection and classification. First, the eddy current thermography system of Si-PV cells is established. Second, principal component analysis, independent component analysis, and nonnegative matrix factorization algorithms are compared for thermography sequences processing. Third, LeNet-5, VGG-16, and GoogleNet models are compared for Si-PV cell defects classification. Finally, the results show that the proposed method have successful application in Si-PV cell defects detection and classification.