Democratizing an electroluminescence imaging apparatus and analytics project for widespread data acquisition in photovoltaic materials

We present a description of an electroluminescence (EL) apparatus, easily sourced from commercially available components, with a quantitative image processing platform that demonstrates feasibility for the widespread utility of EL imaging as a characterization tool. We validated our system using a Gage R&R analysis to find a variance contribution by the measurement system of 80.56%, which is typically unacceptable, but through quantitative image processing and development of correction factors a variance contribution by the measurement system of 2.41% was obtained. We further validated the system by quantifying the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and found values consistent with other systems published in the literature, at SNR values of 10-100, albeit at exposure times of greater than 1 s compared to 10 ms for other systems. This SNR value range is acceptable for image feature recognition, providing the opportunity for widespread data acquisition and large scale data analytics of photovoltaics.