Development of a drop test methodology for solar cells with FEM simulations

The handling of photovoltaic cells is getting a growing concern. Due to the significant fraction of the material costs on the overall costs of solar wafers the cell thickness was reduced from initially 300 μm down to 200 μm or even 150 μm. At the same time, the size of typical cells remained at 156 × 156 mm². Thus, solar cells have the same thickness like microelectronic chips but their size is about 10 to 15 times higher. Due to this bad aspect ratio, cells are fragile and breakage is an often observed problem during cell handling in common production lines.