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2009
Conference Paper
Titel
High voc crystalline silicon thin film solar cells through recrystallised wafer equivalent applied to sintered silicon
Abstract
Among Crystalline Silicon Thin-Films (CSiTF), the concept of Recrystallised Wafer Equivalents (RexWE) established by Fraunhofer ISE has steadily shown high efficiencies on good quality substrates. But no low-cost substrate has yet shown high enough results for an industrial launch of this technology. Meanwhile, the recently created company S'TILE has developed a new approach in wafer manufacturing with Sintering of Silicon Powders. It is a cheap process which presents among other advantages the avoiding of sawing kerf loss and the possibility of high throughput of large area wafers. For this reason, sintered silicon wafers have been used as substrates for RexWE. Up to 9.2 % of efficiency was obtained on non-optimised 4 cm² solar cells with an excellent open circuit voltage of 580 mV. This Voc is the best obtained up to now with this technology with such low-cost substrates. As the RexWE cell process used here has poor optical confinement, the efficiency is likely to dramatically improve with the CSiTF-optimised texturisation and back reflector already developed at Fraunhofer ISE. These very promising results may thereby open to a new lead in CSiTF and trigger some large scale manufacturing.