Successful master's degree in IR thermography on solar facades
Luca Raschke © BAIP/HZB
IR thermoraphy, BIPV living lab © BAIP/HZB
We are delighted to congratulate our student employee Luca Raschke on successfully completing her Master's degree in Renewable Energies at the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin - and with distinction!
As part of her master's thesis on “Thermographic Investigation of Photovoltaic Modules in a Building-Integrated Application”, she investigated the use of infrared thermography as a tool for the inspection and maintenance of facade-integrated PV modules, focusing on the CIGS facades of our Living Lab for building-integrated photovoltaics at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. In doing so, she not only investigated the measurement methodology and the specific application for vertically-installed facade modules, but also carried out complementary investigations with electroluminescence and other electrical characterisations of the modules. With her thesis, she made valuable contributions to our ongoing research and development in the field of BIPV.
We are proud of this outstanding achievement and are delighted that we can celebrate this important milestone together! Luca Raschke remains a part of the consultancy office for BIPV, but from now on as a student at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BHT) in the Architecture program. We wish her continued success.
- Solar experts meet in BerlinThe sixth tandemPV Workshop will take place in Berlin, Germany from June 17-19, 2026, hosted by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin.
- Superconducting TES array X-ray spectrometer goes into operation at BESSY IIThe TES-Spectrometer was developed within a collaboration between the HZB, the MPI-CEC (Mühlheim-an-der-Ruhr, Germany) and the NIST (Boulder CO, USA) and is now in operation at BESSY II, as the only TES-Spectrometer at a synchrotron source in Europe. The photon detection efficiency of the new instrument exceeds that of wavelength-dispersive X-ray emission spectrometers by a factor of 100 to 1000. It will be used to investigate the electronic properties of atomically thin layers, nanostructures and highly diluted atomic and molecular samples. The team is looking forward to receiving exciting research proposals from the user community.
- AI agents deliver results – but do they reason scientifically?A research team co-led by Kevin Maik Jablonka from the Helmholtz Institute for Polymers in Energy Applications Jena (HIPOLE Jena) and N. M. Anoop Krishnan from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi has developed Corral, a new benchmark for AI agents in science. The preprint “AI scientists produce results without reasoning scientifically” has been published on arXiv (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.18805). The analysis shows that current systems can execute scientific workflows and deliver results; however, they often do not follow the basic principles of scientific testing and reasoning.