Estimating service lifetimes of a polymer encapsulant for photovoltaic modules from accelerated testing

In this paper, most of the emphasis is on A9918 ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) used commercially as the pottant for encapsulating photovoltaic (PV) modules, in which the efficiencies in field-deployed modules have been reduced by 10-70% in 4-12 years. Yet, projections were made by several different research groups in the 1980s that the EVA lifetime could range from 2-100 years. The authors: (1) elucidate the complexity of the encapsulation problem; (2) indicate the performance losses reported for PV systems deployed since 1981; (3) critically assess the service lifetime predictions for EVA as a PV pottant based on studies by others for which they review the inherent errors in their assumptions about the Arrhenius relation; (4) show how degradation of minimodules in laboratory experiments that simulate reality can produce efficiency losses comparable to those in field-degraded PV modules reported in the literature; and (5) outline an acceptable methodology for making a service lifetime prediction of the polymer encapsulant, including the essential need for relating accelerated lifetime testing to real-time testing with a sufficient number of samples