UV-Induced Degradation and Associated Metastability in TOPCon Photovoltaic Modules: Understanding Kinetics and Cell Variance

Abstract

Tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) silicon photovoltaic (PV) modules are dominating the PV market, but they may be susceptible to degradation under ultraviolet (UV)-containing light. Quantifying the impacts of UV-induced degradation (UVID) is complicated by an associated metastability causing further degradation under dark storage and rapid recovery under sunlight. Here, we study modules that have −2.3% to −3.2% nonrecoverable UVID loss after 60 kWh/m² dose of 340 nm light and additional recoverable loss under dark storage. We use in situ electroluminescence (EL) imaging to characterize the post-UVID metastability at the module level. The cell-by-cell dark degradation and recovery kinetics span a wide range from +6% to −70% changes in EL intensity after 520 h of dark storage, which returns to ± 4% of the initial post-UVID EL intensity after illumination. The kinetics follow double exponential rates with dark storage degradation time constants of 345 and 45 h, and UV light recovery time constants of 5 min and 36 s. We propose that this is consistent with prior reports of kinetics for light-soaking metastability in Al₂O₃ passivation. Finally, we further show that cells having high UVID also have injection-dependent effective carrier lifetimes and significant intra-cell variance, suggesting possible origins of processing inconsistency.