Spatially Resolved Modelling and Analysis of PV Module Failures using Griddler

We have investigated the use of numerical simulation tool such as Griddler to model the effect of spatially distributed faults -cell cracks, interconnect failure, and potential induced degradation- on the IV characteristics of full-size silicon PV modules. We have found that we were able to match the degradation in the IV characteristics observed in our experimental data. Numerical simulation tools might be a viable approach to create large and accurate synthetic data sets to train machine learning algorithms to detect faults at the module level and at the same time preserving the physics of the problem.