A fast and non-destructive failure inspection is essential to ensure the reliability of PV plants. This might only be achieved by using highly sensitive imaging techniques which can detect local electrical losses in solar modules. Here, EL imaging used for outdoor PV inspection gained large interest, since it can be used to characterize local cell damages, series resistances, and shunts in solar modules. However, currently available EL-cameras base on Si-CCD-detectors. Besides high spatial resolutions they exhibit long image integration times (IIT) of about 1 s for obtaining evaluable EL-images. To overcome this limitation we present, for the first time, an InGaAs camera which enables a complete EL-characterization of field-installed PV-modules with IITs between 1 ms and 20 ms. The short IITs result in frame rates of about 100 Hz which even offer the opportunity of recording dynamic EL-movies and daylight Electroluminescence Lock-In (ELLI) measurements. To test the outdoor applicability we compared EL-movies of the InGaAs camera with EL-images of a Si-CCD camera and show that all relevant power reducing cell failures (e. g. cracks) can be detected and characterized.
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Adams et al. (2016) studied this question.