Cell Processing

As the PV industry rapidly advances towards annual PV production and installations on a terawatt scale, many aspects that are currently not critical will need to be considered. Among these, material availability is probably one of the most pressing ones. Established production routines will need to be changed, which may pose significant time constraints in the light of the fast-growing market. The focus of this paper will be on the use of silver for solar cell metallization. Past developments are discussed and an overview is given of the fast-growing number of relevant publications from the scientific community that deal with the problems associated with silver.

This paper reviews the steps to making a breakthrough in TOPCon efficiency, from cell to PV module, by using industrially viable manufacturing processes. A detailed characterization and investigation of the primary losses of JinkoSolar’s TOPCon record cell of July 2020, with an efficiency of 24.8%, is presented.

This paper gives an overview of the technological maturity of various TOPCon approaches with the goal of achieving the most cost-effective, resource-conserving and mass-production-capable implementation.

This paper reviews those associated fabrication technologies for the mass production of Ni/Cu-plated contacts. The technologies currently in use in the PV industry for plated contacts, as well as the developing technologies having high scaling-up potential, will be reviewed. In addition, the future requirements for plating metallization will be discussed.

This paper discusses what is actually behind these announcements and how an evolutionary industry sector such as PVis becoming, it seems, decidedly revolutionary with large jumps in efficiency.

This paper presents an analysis and the results of extensive simulations of the efficiency limits and roadmap to 25.5% of a tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) solar cell, on the basis of an efficiency level of 25.21% (designed area, identified by ISFH) achieved through three years of continuous technical optimization on a pilot line at Longi.

The development of new ways of increasing the production throughput for passivated emitter and rear cells (PERCs), as the major solar cell technology in the global market, is an area of great interest to the PV community. This paper presents approaches for significantly increasing the throughput of PERC production processes. The main focus is on the tube furnace processes for the emitter formation and oxidation, with the introduction of the High Temperature Stack Oxidation (HiTSOx) approach. Additional approaches that are currently under investigation at Fraunhofer ISE for increasing the throughput for wet-chemical, printing and laser processes will also be briefly outlined.

The holy grail of every solar cell producer is the creation of a lowcost interdigitated back-contact (IBC) solar cell with an efficiency greater than 25%, a goal that can be found in almost every roadmap presentation. In this paper it will be shown that we are not far away from achieving this target, since IBC devices, with different process complexities, are already in production at several companies.

This paper will accordingly outline the recent activities at CEA-INES concerning the development and understanding of the integration of such shingle cells.

In this paper, an even greater reduction in wafer thickness, down to 130μm, is evaluated, and the critical steps in terms of breakage rates in cell and module production processes are reviewed. Finally, the mechanical stability and reliability of these thin HJT cells in glass–backsheet and glass–glass module types are addressed.