Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA) has long been a vastly important material for solar cell encapsulation due to ideal properties for the application after undergoing a process of cross-linking. Having a good understanding of the degree of cross-linking of EVA can assist in optimization of both the lamination time as well as the formulation of the EVA encapsulant.
In this application note, a method is described for characterizing the degree of cross-linking using the thermomechanical properties of EVA measured by Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) in shear mode with the PerkinElmer DMA 8000.