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One of todayscrucial topics in solar cell development is cost reduction in order to make solar generated electricity competitive to conventional energy production.Furthermore,PV industry has turned into a highly competitive industry due to current large overcapacities,which obliges Cell manufacturers to constantly drive down cost in order to stay competitive in a harsh environment.Besides wafer,Agpaste consumption is the largest cost driver for solar cell manufacturing.Many efforts are currently undertaken to reduce respective consumption.The volatile Ag-market price is a large unknown for current and future solar cell production at current high consumption levels of 200-250 mg/cell.In this article a new approach is presented for tremendous reduction of Ag cost by replacing the Busbars by an alternative,low-cost material.NiV is widely used in the semiconductor industry due to its good soldering properties and has only 1/100 of the Ag price level.The Ag consumption in a standard cell can be reduced by ca.50-70%.In this paper the results of NiV metallised solar cells are described.The metal was sputter deposited through a shadow mask on front-and backside.Before the solar cell was standardly fired and screenprinted with a frontside Ag-finger grid and a rear Aluminium BSF.Cell data is compared for NiV busbar cells and standard cells.Additionally peel tests after soldering have been conducted and adhesion forces detected.Finally a fully functional 16-cell mini-module with NiV busbars has been manufactured and characterized.The results show very high adhesion peak forces up to 5-8 N for NiV metallization,which is even beyond current standard production levels and well beyond minimum thresholds of ca.1-2 N.Cell performances of NiV cells are slightly better than for standard cells and module powers are practically equal.Reliability testing has been conducted.The damp heat (DH 1000) and temperature cycling (TC 200)test have been passed successfully.Finally a mass volume production platform for NiV deposition on front-and backside in one simultaneous process step is presented and discussed.