Detecting hot spots in PV using IR-imaging has become a valuable tool in the last years. Now, a remotecontrolled drone improves and facilitates the IR-mapping of PV-plants under operating conditions. In the course of this evaluation about 60 different PV-plants were investigated. The inspection time for a single PV-plant (5 kWp – 1000 kWp) took about 5 to 8 minutes. This included several IR-overviews and close-up views. Defects like disconnected strings, substrings, shunted cells, faulty soldering and cell fracture could be visualized and distinguished. The data evaluation yielded a differentiation of cell defects by their temperature rise. In order to get a better understanding of the effects of the detected defects on the module performance, simulations with LTspice formed an essential part of this study. Thus, the influence on the power output of e. g. the size of the cell fracture or the number of shunted cells could be quantified.
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Buerhop‐Lutz et al. (2012) studied this question.