Rodrigo Del Prado Santamaria

Rodrigo del Prado obtained his bachelor in Energy engineering at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in 2019. He started to specialize in the field of photovoltaics in his bachelor thesis ‘’ Comparative of three photovoltaic technologies by means of dimensioning a block of buildings’’. At the same time, during the last months of his bachelor, he was intern in the company CLECE at the energy services department, where he performed energy audits,

technical and economic proposals of energy services and energy savings.

Pursuing further specialization, after completing his bachelor’s degree, he moved to Denmark to study an MSc in Sustainable Energy in the field of Solar Energy at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). During the masters, he started working as Student Assistant in DTU Fotonik in the group of Photovoltaic Materials and Systems, where he gained hands on experience with PV module fabrication, IV measurements and imaging techniques.

In 2021 he completed his master’s thesis “Characterization of solar cell cracks and methods for power loss estimation”. The resulting thesis allowed to publish his first conference paper on “Characterization of Electrical Parameters of Cracked Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells in Photovoltaic Modules” at IEEE PVSC 48.

After completing his MSc, he kept working at DTU Electro in the group of Photovoltaic Materials and Systems as Research Assistant, collaborating in PV reliability projects such as DronEL, LIPI and ADELI. Currently, Rodrigo is a PhD student working on field “Field Luminescence Field Inspections” where he conducts research within imaging diagnostics, drone EL inspections of PV farms and machine learning methods for power loss estimation using EL images.