Screen-Printable Silver Pastes with Nanosized Glass Frits for Silicon Solar Cells

Novel Ceramic Additives for Screen-Printable Silicon Solar Cell Metallization

“…Al 2 O 3 and SiO 2 can enhance the adhesion between the Ag electrodes and n-type silicon layers, but they are not the major etching agents. 3 Therefore, silver coating on the surface of these two additives does not affect the etching rate through the ARC layers. Figure 5 shows SEM images for three different types of samples.…”

“…[1][2][3][4] Silver pastes used in screen printing primarily consist of three constituents including metal silver powders, micro-sized glass frits, and organic carriers. The purpose of adding glass frits is to etch through the Si 3 N 4 anti-reflection coating (ARC) layer above the n-type silicon layers and then silver and n-type silicon layers can form electrical conductive channels.…”

“…It is evident that the composition of the glass frits, as well as the process conditions, should be well controlled to achieve a thin, discontinuous residual glass layer. [1][2][3][4] Nano-sized non-glass frits have been proven to effectively reduce the thickness of the discontinuous residual glass layer due to their excellent etching ability, and specific contact resistivity between Ag/Si interfaces of the samples made with nano-sized ceramic additives is only about 40% of that of the samples made with micronsized ones. 3 Ceramic additives of smaller sizes possess larger surface areas, and therefore can achieve faster etching rates to remove the ARC layer with less material, which also reduces the firing duration and prevents the residual glass from experiencing accumulation at the Ag/Si interfaces.…”

“…To avoid the complex interaction between different ceramic components at high firing temperatures, only Bi 2 O 3 , Al 2 O 3 , fused SiO 2 , and ZnO were used in this work, and the firing conditions including firing temperature and duration were the same as in our previous study. 3 In order to maintain the function of ceramic additives, parameters of electroless plating were controlled to obtain a partial coverage of silver coating on the ceramic substrates. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and x-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to identify the silver deposition on the ceramic additives.…”

Silver doping of glasses

“…Though not directly related to silver nanoclusters, an interesting example of the use of silver-doped glasses in sensoristics is the possibility of using silver for creating also optical planar waveguides for chemical sensors [21], while other application fields of silver nanoclusterdoped glass [77] include biosensors (see for example Ref. [78]), biomedical application [79][80][81][82][83], mostly for antibacterial actions [23][24][84][85][86], solar technologies [87][88], glass colouring [89][90][91][92][93], surface-enhanced Raman scattering [94][95], radiophotoluminescence [96][97][98], glass fibers [99][100].…”