High-efficiency Multicrystalline Silicon Solar Cells using Standard High-temperature, Float-zoned Cell Processing

✍ Scribed by Jianhua Zhao; Aihua Wang; Martin A. Green

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 165 KB
• Volume: 5
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1062-7995
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-159x(199705/06)5:3<169::aid-pip170>3.0.co;2-r

✦ Synopsis

This paper reports recent results of fabricating multicrystalline silicon solar cells with the standard PERL (passivated emitter, rear locally-diused) cell high-temperature processing sequence originally developed for ¯oat-zoned wafers. One of these multicrystalline silicon cells with a planar front surface demonstrated a 645-mV opencircuit voltage and 18.2% energy conversion eciency tested at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories under the 100 mW cm À2 AM1.5 global spectrum at 258C. This is the highest con®rmed voltage and one of the highest con®rmed conversion eciencies ever reported to date for a multicrystalline silicon cell. Further optimization of the standard PERL processing and texturing of the cell surfaces is expected to improve the cell eciency to over 19% in the near future.