Spire, a solar company that supplies capital equipment and modular type of production lines for the manufacture of solar photovoltaic modules, has declared that it will supply its patented Spi-Sun Simulator 4600SLP for use in the European Commission’s Joint Research Center located in Ispra, Italy.
Currently, Spire’s Simulators are utilized in over thirty testing labs for the purpose of qualifying the PV modules all over the world.
According to Roger G. Little, Spire’s Chairman and CEO, the simulators manufactured by the company with their Class AAA rating have become a criterion for testing solar PV modules. The patented technique of checking the pulse length of the simulator, its broad level of irradiance range and its better spectral control offers the test labs with a potent means to evaluate the performance of the solar PV modules accurately in the development or the qualification stage. The simulators work in almost all types of production environments and hundreds of such simulators are utilized in various production facilities all over the world.
The European Solar Test Installation (ESTI) lab located in Ispra, Italy has been certifying the solar modules for nearly 20 years now. The Ispra 503 is an industry standard, which is currently followed as the criteria for the crystalline modules (IEC61215) and subsequently as a standard (IEC 61646) for the thin film modules by the International Electro Technical Commission (IEC).