Inert Drying System for Copper Paste Application in PV

Clement, C.; Bell, H.C.; Vogg, F.; Rebenklau, Lars; Gierth, Paul; Partsch, Uwe

doi:10.1016/j.egypro.2013.07.299

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Nonetheless, it is possible that the copper paste can be in direct contact with the silicon if the copper particles are coated with barrier layers in order to prevent copper from diffusing into the silicon. Another issue of copper in the application to the paste form is that copper tends to oxidize easily during thermal treatment [13,[22][23][24][25]. Since copper oxide shows an electrically nonconductive characteristic, it will increase the series resistance in the solar cells.…”

Section: Recent Developments In Photovoltaic Materials and Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The curing process is carried out at a lower-temperature range than the firing process, which is generally used for the conventional silver paste. Rehm thermal systems GmbH and Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems reported the effect of curing conditions on properties of the electrode which is printed with the polymer-based copper paste [22,42,62,85]. By using an inert inline drying system, they show that curing with a high nitrogen atmosphere and temperature at 200°C can significantly decrease the resistance of copper paste electrode [42].…”

Section: Curing Conditions Of Copper Paste For High Electrical Propermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In case of the heat transfer method, a radiation method is more beneficial for the lower resistance of electrode than a convection method [62]. Moreover, the minimum resistance and decent adhesion can be obtained by increasing the processing time [22]. Consequently, this group confirmed that the polymer-based copper paste, which was annealed by the inert curing, can improve conductivity and mechanical stability of the polymer-based copper paste by achieving 19.96% efficiency with the SHJ solar cell, even though the fill factor (FF) is still lower than that of silver paste-printed cells.…”

Section: Curing Conditions Of Copper Paste For High Electrical Propermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conductive Copper Paste for Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells

Lee¹,

Lee²

2019

Recent Developments in Photovoltaic Materials and Devices

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In photovoltaic industries, the main technique of metallization is screen printing with silver pastes due to its simple and quick process. However, the expensive price of silver paste is one of the barriers to the production of low-cost solar cells. Therefore, the most focused target in photovoltaic research is the decreasing consumption of silver paste or substitute silver for other materials. As a proper candidate, copper has been researched by many institutes and companies since it has a similar conductivity with silver even though the price is inexpensive. To apply copper as a contact for solar cells, the plating technique has been actively researched. However, copper paste, which was mainly developed for integrated circuit applications, has been recently researched. Mostly, copper paste was developed for the low-temperature annealing process since copper tends to oxidize easily. On the other hand, firing type copper paste was also developed by coating copper particles with a barrier layer. This chapter discusses recent development of copper paste for the application of solar cells and its appropriate annealing conditions for better electrical properties. Also, the light I-V characteristics of copper paste on the solar cells in other research papers are summarized as well.

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Section: Recent Developments In Photovoltaic Materials and Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Curing Conditions Of Copper Paste For High Electrical Propermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Curing Conditions Of Copper Paste For High Electrical Propermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Conductive Copper Paste for Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells

Lee¹,

Lee²

2019

Recent Developments in Photovoltaic Materials and Devices

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“…Because of potential for oxidization of copper, copper printing techniques were dismissed earlier on. Especially during the drying process, exposure of copper pastes to (hot) air leads to significant degradation, but more recently, good results were obtained when copper pastes are dried in an inert atmosphere [40], although these results were obtained on aluminium oxide substrates, not yet on solar cells.…”

Section: Metallizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life‐cycle greenhouse gas emissions and energy payback time of current and prospective silicon heterojunction solar cell designs

Louwen

Sark

Turkenburg

et al. 2014

Progress in Photovoltaics

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Silicon heterojunction (SHJ) cells offer high efficiencies and several advantages in the production process compared to conventional crystalline silicon solar cells. We performed a life-cycle assessment to identify the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint, energy payback time (EPBT) and cumulative energy demand of four different SHJ solar cell designs. We analyse these environmental impacts for cell processing and complete systems for both current and prospective designs. On the basis of in-plane irradiation of 1700 kWh/m 2 , results for current designs show that life-cycle GHG emissions could be 32 gCO 2 -eq/kWh for complete SHJ photovoltaic (PV) systems (module efficiencies of 18.4%), compared with 38 gCO 2 -eq/kWh for conventional monocrystalline silicon systems (module efficiency of 16.1%). The EPBT of all SHJ designs was found to be 1.5 years, compared with 1.8 years for the monocrystalline PV system. Cell processing contributes little (Ä 6%) to the overall environmental footprint of SHJ PV systems. Among cell processing steps, vacuum based deposition contributes substantially to the overall results, with 55-80%. Atomic layer deposition of thin films was found to have a significantly lower environmental footprint compared to plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition and sputtering. Copper-based compared with silver-based metallization was shown to reduce the impact of this processing step by 74-84%. Increases in cell efficiency, use of thin silicon wafers and replacement of silver-based with copper-based metallization could result in life-cycle GHG emissions for systems to be reduced to 20 gCO 2 -eq/kWh for SHJ systems and 25 gCO 2 -eq/kWh for monocrystalline system, while EPBT could drop to 0.9 and 1.2 years, respectively.

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“…Within this context, Cu pastes were developed and were used successfully for the formation of passivated busbars, yielding results comparable to those obtained by conventional Ag metallization . Also, appropriate equipment for the thermal treatment of Cu pastes was developed , with the aid of which the oxidation of the metal during processing is avoided.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Screen‐printed copper for front‐ and back‐side metallization of single‐ and multi‐crystalline silicon solar cells

Dapei

Papadimitropoulos

Varvitsiotis³

et al. 2015

Physica Status Solidi (a)

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The metallization of multi‐crystalline and single‐crystalline Si (m‐ and sc‐Si, respectively) photovoltaic (PV) solar cells was investigated by using copper screen print pastes designed for electronics packaging applications. For this purpose, Cu features were printed on m‐Si and sc‐Si silicon substrates using low pressure chemically vapor deposited (LPCVD) tungsten layers as adhesion promoters and barriers against Cu diffusion, and self‐assembled monolayers (SAMs) of (3‐mercaptopropyl) trimethoxysilane (MPTMS) as adhesion promoters. It was found that pastes may be annealed at temperatures of the order of 600 °C, in primary vacuum and under reducing ambient to give acceptable Cu/Si contacts that pass the Scotch test and standard metallic strips may be soldered on them. Contacts of the form Cu/MPTMS/m‐Si were proved of limited lifetime; their study has shown that the Schottky barrier height was of the order of 0.45 eV. Screen‐printed Cu/LPCVD W/Si (substrate) contacts proved stable in time for sc‐Si but were found unstable for m‐Si. Cu was also printed on the Al layer used for the creation of the back‐surface field in industrial m‐Si PV cells by using SAMs of 11‐mercaptodouncyl phosphorus acid (MDTA) as adhesion promoters. The corresponding contacts did not affect the performance of cells and proved stable for a time period of the order of 1 month.

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Inert Drying System for Copper Paste Application in PV

Cited by 8 publications

References 2 publications

Conductive Copper Paste for Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells

Conductive Copper Paste for Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells

Life‐cycle greenhouse gas emissions and energy payback time of current and prospective silicon heterojunction solar cell designs

Screen‐printed copper for front‐ and back‐side metallization of single‐ and multi‐crystalline silicon solar cells

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