Scaling Solar: Reliability Testing of Flexible Perovskite PV
INDUSTRY:
Cleantech / renewable energy
TYPE OF WORK:
Test system engineering and mechanical ruggedization for solar PV reliability validation.
About the Client
Rayleigh Solar Tech
Rayleigh Solar Tech has developed flexible perovskite single-junction solar cell technology. Perovskite is an emerging photovoltaic material that can be deposited on a flexible substrate rather than the glass panel (traditional silicon-based solar cells) used across most of the industry. The company’s core goal is to drive down the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) by leveraging this flexible form factor – a significant departure from the rest of the solar industry.
Perovskite PV is relatively new to the market. It is efficient and can already be manufactured at scale, but because it lacks the decades of real-world deployment history that silicon PV has, its failure modes and long-term reliability are far less understood. De-risking the technology and building genuine confidence that devices will perform for the multi-year lifetimes customers expect is therefore central to the company’s product strategy.
Understanding the Problem
The Challenge
The company needed to validate the performance and long-term durability of prototype perovskite cells and modules across the following multiple accelerated and real-world test conditions:
- End-of-line testing: Characterise and validating samples as they come off the manufacturing line.
- Accelerated life testing: Expose samples to intense artificial light and heat to simulate years of sun exposure in a compressed timeframe.
- Damp heat testing: Accelerated ageing condition, assess performance under sustained heat and humidity.
- Outdoor testing: Place samples outdoors to observe real-world degradation and performance over time.
Each of these test types created its own engineering problem:
- Fixturing at scale: Hundreds of individual solar cells each needed to be physically secured and electrically connected to test equipment simultaneously, with continuous maximum power point (MPP) tracking across every channel, ultimately scaling to 250+individual tracked channels. Stability testing is inherently slow, indoor tests can run for hundreds or thousands of hours, and outdoor tests can take months to years per sample. Parallel testing at scale was the only practical way to iterate quickly on device design.
- Environmental protection: Connecting the prototype samples for the outdoor operation requires protection for the wires and the connection points from rain and weather, thus special junction boxes have to be used for each device.
- Repeatability: The existing manual process limited both throughput and the consistency of results as samples were cycled through testing. Our engineering design and discovery process address this kind of problems and help you have more clarity on solving it.
Accelerated Aging Test Fixture
Solar Pixels and long-term sun performance
End of Line Fixture Samples
Performance Characterization and EOL performance
Environmental Testing Fixture
Component under test, Ruggedised and Waterproofed
Module Junction Box
Environmental test fixture for larger solar modules
Solving the Challenge
The Solution
The Enginuity team was brought in partway through the existing electronics architecture’s development, rather than designing it from scratch. Their contribution focused on:
- Mechanical ruggedization: Applied prior experience in connector design, sealing, and ruggedization to solve the fixturing and environmental protection components.
- Manufacturing and supply chain expertise: Leveraged existing relationships with PCB manufacturers and assemblers to execute the build efficiently.
- Scaling the test system: Delivered six “sample electrical boxes,” each connecting to 24 samples (each with 4 cells), dramatically increasing the number of devices that could be tested simultaneously.
- Cost reduction: Brought the cost down from roughly $500 per pixel (typical of predicate silicon-solar test systems) to approximately $75 per pixel – a major cost improvement, achieved partly by accepting sequential rather than simultaneous data collection as a trade-off.
The final deliverable was six complete test systems, now in use under artificial sun simulators and outdoors to test greater numbers of samples for performance and degradation over time.
Summarizing the Outcome
The Conclusion
Rayleigh Solar Tech’s partnership with Enginuity has put the promising technology well on the road towards a rigorously validated product. Scaling from a single test probe to six integrated systems tracking 250+ channels solved the fixturing, connectivity, and environmental protection challenges standing between prototype-scale research and industrial-scale reliability data.
Additionally, the demands of the tough Canadian climate required real-world validation, where samples must withstand exposure to light, heat and their cycles, humidity, and weather exposure without losing electrical connection.
The solution also achieved this at a fraction of predicate system costs, proving that cost optimisation and testing rigor aren’t mutually exclusive. Cutting per-pixel costs from roughly $500 to approximately $75 changed what was possible, enables the parallel, high-throughput testing that stability good science requires rather than a slower program dictated by budget.
Together, these outcomes give Rayleigh Solar Tech, its investors and future customers, credible, data-backed confidence in a technology. Meanwhile, this partnership has solidified Enginuity’s presence in the reliability testing space, an extension of the product development work we do across industries.
Key Takeaways
High-throughput Testing
De-risking the Tech
