Novel Ceramic Additives for Screen-Printable Silicon Solar Cell Metallization

Abstract

The interfacial structure between front-side silver electrodes and n-type silicon emitters plays a very crucial role for the electrical and mechanical properties of silicon solar cells. Studies show that the residual glass layers at the Ag/Si interfaces will significantly increase the contact resistance, and this subsequently leads to a decrease in the overall efficiency of the silicon solar cells. In this work, silver-coated nano-sized non-glass frits using an electroless plating method were employed to improve the interfacial conductivity. Transfer length method was applied to evaluate the electrical performance of the samples made with different ceramic additives. For samples made with nano-sized silver-coated ceramic additives, the improvement of conductivity was found to be about 22% compared to additives with the same compositions with no surface treatment. The results indicate that the silver layer on the surface of ceramic additives provides a conducting channel within the residual insulating layer and therefore reduces overall electrical resistance.