Concentrating Photovoltaic (CPV) is based on the concentration of solar rays on very-high efficienciessolar cells. Multi-junction architectures used in CPV systems reach efficiency superior to44% under concentration. This has created great interest for this technology over the past decade.Nevertheless, CPV has still to be proven reliable. This work contributes to this goal.CPV assemblies -or receivers- are defined by the electrical, mechanical and thermal cohesionof a multi-junction solar cell on an appropriate substrate. The complexity of multi-junctionarchitecture does not allow their characterization with the existing PV tools. Therefore, the firstachievement of the work was the development of a complete infrastructure for the characterizationof such devices. The second part developed accelerated ageing tests and analysis methods to studythe degradation process of these assemblies.A new method for the characterization of die-attached CPV cell assembly has been provensuccessful. It is called EEL for Enhanced ElectroLuminescence. This method is cost effective andreally fast and has therefore been patented. Regarding the characterization of performance of CPVcell assembly under illumination (2nd part of the thesis), collaboration has been made with theInstituto de Energìa Solar (IES) in Madrid, Spain. Thanks to this collaboration, two types of CPVcell assemblies have been studied. One based on the Direct Bonded Copper (DBC) substrate, correspondingto the state-of-the-art and most used type of substrate in CPV industry. The other is acompletely new type of substrate, inspired by the Insulated Metal Substrate (IMS). This new IMSbased CPV cell assembly has been developed by the CEA and its industrial partners. The reliabilitystudy of these CPV cell assemblies (DBC and IMS) has been conducted through acceleratedageing tests. It has been shown that none of the DBC or IMS cell assembly present infant mortalityor failure upon ageing.This work has launched the CPV activity at INES. Results on receivers now need to be confirmedon complete CPV-modules and systems.
On the understanding of failure and ageing mechanisms of photovoltaics cell-assemblies used under high concentration