A NEW TEST METHOD FOR SHIPPING PALLETS OF SOLAR PRODUCTS

The photovoltaic (PV) industry is expanding rapidly to meet the growing renewable-energy demands globally. The failure-rate analysis indicated that a large portion of the accelerated PV module qualification failures were related to the failure of PV cell itself, which was leading to the yield loss of PV products during shipping or transportation. Therefore, the damaged cell (or module) caused by shipping is always one of the serious problems to impact the long-term reliability of PV product. This paper aims to propose a new test method of reliability evaluation for shipping pallet of solar product. The first scenario is the test pallet shipped in fab (e.g., fork-lift truck or hand-pallet truck). The second scenario is the test pallet transported from fab to fab by different vehicle (e.g., truck, train, aircraft, and shipboard). Consequently, detailed results were applied to SEMI Doc. 5431 and released as SEMI PV56-1214 by voting in December 2014. The solar cell/module/system makers and buyers, or any other party interested like package design, can thus have a common document to refer to when desired.