FMECA technique on photovoltaic module

The solar photovoltaic industry has seen rapid expansion in the past decade with an ever-increasing share of the electricity-generating capacity for the world. For the emerging photovoltaic (PV) industry the assessment of the quality and reliability of its products is becoming more and more important. To this aim and to ensure an optimal design and material choice, a failure modes, effects and criticality analysis methodology (FMECA) to classify the occurrence, the severity and the impact of all possible failure mechanisms on the PV system has been introduced. This helps to eliminate or reduce the impact of potential failure modes before the completion of the design and before failures occur in the field. By means of this analysis it can be noticed that a crucial aspect in PV systems is the cleaning status of the panel surface. In this paper this problem has been analyzed by means of an experimental activity. Finally a method for the assessment of the PV panel condition has been proposed.