Understanding and Development of Screen-Printed Front Metallization for High-Efficiency Low-to-Medium Concentrator Silicon Solar Cells

A review of concentrator silicon solar cells

“…The structure of the cell was similar to that of the common industrial crystalline silicon solar cell, but its size was made much smaller to decrease its operating current and to suit the concentrator. Coello et al made the cells using industrial crystalline silicon solar cell manufacturing process, they used plating technology to increase the density and thickness of grids to decrease the series resistance, the efficiency was close to 14% under 15 [58], they predicted that the efficiency would be larger than 21% after using PERC (passivated emitter rear contact ) structure, which used a back passivation layer with local BSF and metal contact [15,59], the structure of the PERC cell is shown in Fig. 7, but extra efforts must be made to decrease the added series resistance caused by local metal contact.…”

“…The bifacial contact cells and back contact cells made by CMOS-like process have high efficiency (larger than 25%) under high concentration (100-200 suns) [19,44], but their costs are high even the process is simplified. The bifacial contact cells made by common industrial crystalline silicon solar cell manufacturing process using CZ wafers have low costs, their highest efficiency is larger 20% under low concentration and larger than 19% under middle concentration (C o50 suns) [57,58]. If multi bus-bar, advanced manufacturing technology of front metal grids and advanced device structures are used, the efficiency may reach 21% under a certain concentration ratio.…”

Mechanism of silver/glass interaction in the metallization of crystalline silicon solar cells

“…The important impact that Ag paste metallization imposes on cell efficiency is reflected in Ag line resistivity and Ag/ Si contact resistivity [3,4]. Even for the presently leading mono-crystalline Si cells with conversion efficiency over 20%, there is still a space of at least 20% increment in efficiency that can be achieved by improving Ag paste metallization [5].…”