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We thank you so much for the opportunity to further improve our paper. We have addressed
the issues raised by the reviewers as follows:
The accuracy of simulation results depends on mesh density as earlier mentioned by the two
reviewers. This necessitated mesh sensitivity study to investigate the effect of element size on
simulation results. Model 1 shown in Table 4 of the manuscript was chosen for the mesh
sensitivity study. Three geometric models were built with the same dimensions but meshed
with different mesh sizes. Presented in Table1 are parameters of the three geometric models
with mesh element size of 0.00085m, 0.0012m and 0.0017m and named Fine, Medium and
Coarse respectively.
Model IMC thickness Solder joint Solder joint Solder joint Mesh element
name (µm) thickness (µm) thickness (µm) vol. (mm3) size (m)
Fine 1 20 1000 1.56 0.00085
Medium 1 20 1000 1.56 0.00120
Coarse 1 20 1000 1.56 0.00170
The meshed models are shown in Fig. 1. From the figure as well as from Table 1, it can be
observed that Fine model has smallest mesh element size while Coarse model has the largest
mesh element size.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Table 2 Creep strain energy density and predicted life for meshed models
Furthermore, the predicted fatigue life of the Medium model is 15317 cycles to failure which
is close to the expected 13688 cycles to failure (25 years) for PV modules. Based on these
findings, the mesh size of the Medium model was chosen. Accordingly, the parameters and
mesh density of Medium model was used for Model 1 as can be observed in Table 4 in the
manuscript. Moreover, the accumulated strain energy density of Medium model is the same
as that of the Model 1 as presented in Table 5 in the manuscript. Therefore, the authors
believe the mesh size used was adequate as the results obtained in the study were within the
expected range.