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In this paper, a reliability analysis of a photovoltaic rural electrification (PVRE) programme is proposed considering the failures in the 13 000 installed Solar Home System (SHS) devices occurring over a long operating period of 5 years. A previous arrangement of the database and a brief explanation of the reliability concepts will serve to introduce the failure distribution of every component, from which the SHS lifetime operating features will be described. An application example will show the usefulness of the obtained results in the forecasting of spare parts during the maintenance period. The conclusions of this study may be useful in the scientific design of PVRE programme maintenance structures, with the goal of shedding some light on the technical management mechanisms in decentralised rural electrification.

This work implements an optimization of the phosphorus gettering effect during the contact co‐firing step by means of both simulations and experiments in an industrial belt furnace. An optimized temperature profile, named ‘extended co‐firing step’, is presented. Simulations show that the effect of the short annealing on the final interstitial iron concentration depends strongly on the initial contamination level of the material and that the ‘extended co‐firing’ temperature profile can enhance the gettering effect within a small additional time. Experimental results using sister wafers from the same multicrystalline silicon ingot confirm these trends and show the potential of this new defect engineering tool to improve the solar cell efficiency (© 2012 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

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