Solar farms are sprouting up in rural areas and solar arrays on homes and commercial buildings. All of them are supposed to last 25 years, but will they? CWRU has launched a major research center to help make sure they do -- and much longer.
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Roger French, a professor of materials science at Case Western Reserve University, heads up a global research effort into making manufactured products such as solar panels and LED light bulbs more durable. French and his associates are using laboratory equipment, such as this Cincinnati Sub-Zero environmental test chamber equipped with nine 1,000-watt, high-intensity discharge lamps to provide light to wired solar panels while the chamber is very hot and humid or extremely cold.
Millions of watts of solar power are being built around the world, across the nation -- even in Ohio, where not every utility has embraced the technology.
Once considered exotic, solar panels are cropping up on the roofs of big box retail and grocery stores, in neighborhoods and along interstate highways where they power weather stations.
They have become a mass market product - one that could create a massive headache if the industry can't guarantee performance over the long haul.
With millions of dollars in backing from the industry and Ohio's Third Frontier, a new research team at Case Western Reserve University is at the center of a global engineering drive to figure out how air pollution, the weather -- and sunlight itself -- can slowly damage a solar panel and reduce its output.
With a name that will the tie the tongues of many, the Solar Durability and Lifetime Extension Center is on a mission to improve the multiple materials and technologies built into every solar panel, every LED light, and a multitude of other materials used in other manufactured products that must stand up to the environment. The idea is to extend their durability and performance.
"What we are seeing is that energy is a big topic," said center director Roger French, a professor of materials science and a 25-year veteran researcher for DuPont. "They (materials and products) are a large investment. And if you can't be comfortable with how long they will last, you will have a major hesitation about whether you should buy it."
Typically, solar panels are guaranteed to last 25 years. Some have been operating for nearly 40 years, and without any maintenance. That's the good news.
The bad news is that over years, the power output of even the best panels slowly decreases. And in cheap panels, it can plummet much sooner.
"Energy technology needs to last 40 to 60 years," French. "The question comes down to a technology's lifetime performance, not on its initial performance but its lifetime performance. And that is what makes this a scientific challenge -- how do we approach a question that is 50 years long and have confidence that we can figure out solid answers? That is the focus of what we are working on."
French is pretty sure it can be done.
"I think in 10 years, PV (photo-voltaic) modules will be engineered to last 60 years," he said, a few days before the center's grand opening on Thursday.
With a staff of nearly two dozen, including post doctorate, graduate and undergraduate students, the center on the CWRU campus has been busy systematically torturing solar panels from the world's major manufacturers.
The panels -- and just as importantly, the materials from which they are made -- are being subjected to light brighter than sunlight anywhere on earth, temperatures hotter than Death Valley in the summer and colder than an Antarctic winter.
Some are also bathed in corrosive salty fog, others blasted with heat and humidity higher than any jungle. One laboratory apparatus can focus light so that it is 1,200 times brighter than the sun.
The point of all of this abuse is to systematically simulate years of real-world service in only a few months or a couple of years.
For example, the center is testing the stability of an acrylic used in some panels and panel mirrors to withstand the sun over years and years of exposure without fogging up or losing its ability to protect a panel's electro-chemical innards.
"We are running this test at 50 suns of intensity," said French. "That allows us in two years to expose a real sample to 25 years of sun light. The same behavior is going on in the acrylic, but more quickly."
In another test chamber, lab assistants are testing rows of electronic boxes -- inverters that switch direct current from solar panels to alternating current found in homes and offices.
The inverters are subjected to extreme cold and extreme humidity and heat -- while operating inside the laboratory test equipment, converting DC to AC and feeding it back into the lab's wall circuits in conditions more extreme than they would typically encounter. The idea is to accelerate aging under extreme environmental conditions.
In another very large, stainless steel box, too big to even get into the center's labs and occupying its own ground floor room, researchers are subjecting two operating solar panels to light from nine 1,000-watt bulbs. That's the light equivalent to the sun at noon.
The researchers can lower the temperature inside the big box to ultra deep freeze conditions or simulate desserts or jungles, and record each solar panel's power output over time.
Center's "solar farm" testing thousands of materials
Across from the campus' White Building where the laboratories are housed, the center is operating its own "solar farm" on the grounds of the old Mt. Sinai Hospital.
On 14 large, heavy-duty, pole-mounted trackers that precisely follow the sun even on cloudy days, the center is testing 142 panels and 8,000 samples of materials that are commonly found in a solar panel.
The second-by-second output of every panel is recorded and logged into computers located back at the White Building laboratory.
Also logged simultaneously are data about environmental conditions -- temperature, humidity, rainfall, snow, even the wind velocity (which can lower the temperature of a panel and increase its output).
"Until now, most people would say 'Let's put panels in Arizona where it is hot and dry,'" said French. "But here, they have a lot of snow and ice, a very different environment."
The center is connected in real time over an Ethernet, not only to its own solar farm but to several others in Ohio, other parts of the United States and soon, Taiwan and India.
"We can put samples, modules or components in multiple environmental conditions, which is a big part of understanding how things will behave in the real world," said French of the global network.
He said the center intends to publish the results of its research work as well as to consult with its partners, which include Underwriters Laboratories as well as solar panel manufacturers and makers of inverters.
French thinks all of this research muscle can do more than make solar panels more durable.
"The center is not a PV testing center. It is the solar durability and lifetime extension testing center of -- whatever," he said.
"Therefore, we work on PV modules. We also look at LED lights and LED light fixtures. We look at energy efficiency technologies, for example, the materials that go into a building's 'envelope,' its roofing materials, the framing materials for windows, the insulating glass units. We help companies look into these durability issues."
Because of this industry-orientated broad focus, the center will make Northeast Ohio the wellspring of new technologies in the coming decades, French said.
"We are in an area where we do a lot of manufacturing, There are a lot of materials made here in Northeast Ohio. Lots of components are made here. And there are a lot of systems designed. These are things that go out all around the world."