Advanced luminescence based effective series resistance imaging of silicon solar cells

A technique for fast and spatially resolved measurement of the effective series resistance of silicon solar cells from luminescence images is introduced. Without compromising the speed of existing luminescence based series resistance imaging methods, this method offers significant advantages in that it is more robust against variations in local diode characteristics. Lateral variations in the series resistance of an industrial screen printed multicrystalline silicon solar cell obtained from this method show excellent correlation with a Corescan measurement and are also shown to be unaffected by lateral variations in the diode properties.