Every cell needs a beautiful image: on-the-fly contacting measurements for high-throughput production

Abstract

The future of the energy transition will lead to a terrawatt-scale photovoltaic market, which can be served cost-effectively primarily by means of high-throughput production of solar cells. In addition to high-throughput production, characterization must be adapted to highest cycle times. Therefore, we present an innovative approach to detect image defects in solar cells using on-the-fly electroluminescence measurements. When a solar cell passes a standard current–voltage (I–V) unit, the cell is stopped, contacted, measured, released, and afterwards again accelerated. In contrast to this, contacting and measuring the sample on-the-fly saves a lot of time. Yet, the resulting images are blurred due to high-speed motion. For the development of such an on-the-fly contact measurement tool, a deblurring method is developed in this work. Our deep-learning-based deblurring model enables to present a clean EL image of the solar cell to the human operator and allows for a proper defect detection, reaching a correlation coefficient of 0.84.