Analysis and Material Modeling of Mechanical Property Degradation for Simulation of Weather Exposed Polymers

The photovoltaic (PV) industry is expanding rapidly in order to achieve global climate change goals. The challenges of reducing the cost and increasing lifetime of a PV system are consistently pushing the industry to provide products with increased quality and reliability. PV systems are susceptible to prolonged exposure to various weather conditions as it is an outdoor application installed in different locations all over the world. Like many other industrial applications, PV systems use polymeric components which are known to suffer from aging effects when exposed to harsh weather conditions for long periods of time. Hence, it is rather inevitable to consider potential material degradation effects already in the design phase. This is where virtual design analysis tools such as finite element analysis (FEA) become important for performance prediction. This requires the development of methods to generate suitable long-term mechanical property degradation data that can be modeled in FEA. This work focuses on the mechanical property changes due to accelerated laboratory testing of polymers and presents a method to estimate long exposure performance to be further used in FEA numerical simulations.