Jochen Wirth was born in Ulm on 12th June 1981.
After his graduation in econophysics at the University of Ulm (Germany) in January 2008 he started to work at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) with the working group Durability Analysis and Environmental Simulations. He spent his studies in Ulm, Newcastle (Australia) and in Freiburg (Germany) at the Fraunhofer ISE for his thesis. Furthermore, he worked with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (USA) as an intern. In his master thesis "Simulation of Mass Transport Procedures within Polymeric Materials as Constituents of Photovoltaic Modules" he already dealt with the modelling and simulation of ageing procedures in photovoltaic modules.
"Comparison of Ageing Procedures of different Thin Film Technologies within Photovoltaic Modules"
There has been a significant growth of the photovoltaic market in recent years. For the occurring product, the photovoltaic module, producers give warranties of up to 25 years. Due to degradation processes, decreases in performance or changes in security, as well as in the design of the modules, can occur. This can be due to weather conditions the modules are exposed to, like high temperatures, UV radiation and humidity. Especially for modules based on thin film technologies (e.g. amorphous Si, CdTe, µc-Si, CI(G)S) there is still very few resilient data for degradation behaviours and the durable development of performance.
In order to compare the degradation of the performance of different types of thin film photovoltaic modules, this degradation shall be caused and analysed by natural and accelerated ageing procedures. The correlations of the degradation indicators which will be found out of the models, shall lead to a estimation of service life time.
Further, modelling of the ageing procedure under different stress conditions shall be carried out. Those results are to be compared and validated with the experimental work on natural and accelerated ageing. Based on those, ageing models for durability estimations shall be developed. These models shall predict the degradation in performance depending on the climate of different locations as well as the integral energy output for different module types at different locations.
