Dan Wu, aPhD student from CREST, Loughborough University,won an award at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) PV Module Reliability Workshop(PVMR) 2013. Her work is part of the RCUK funded project Stability and Performance of Photovoltaics (STAPP). 

The NREL PVMR 2013 was held in Golden, Colorado, US on 26th and 27th February. Its focus was on accelerated testing and field experience with PV modulesleading to the improvement of PV module reliability. Such improvement reduces the cost of solar electricity and promotes investor confidence in the technology-both critical goals for moving PV technologies deeper into the electricity marketplace.

Dan's poster entitled'The degradation study of the peel strength of mini-modules under damp heat conditions' was awarded the prize of the best poster in the Humidity and Temperature Session.The poster studies the adhesion strength degradation between module backsheet and encapsulant of mini-modules aged under different damp heat conditions. A modelling approach is developed to model the ageing behaviours, which is able to correlate the outdoor ageing to indoor accelerated ageing.