Project "Rock-Star" - High-Speed Rotary Printing for Solar Cell Metallization: From Vision to Reality

Within this work, we will present the machine concept and the first results of passivated emitter and rear contact (PERC) solar cells fabricated on an innovative high-throughput rotary printing demonstrator machine which has been developed within the research project »Rock-Star«. The machine is designed to perform the metallization of Silicon solar cells with a printing speed of up to 600 mm/s and a cycle time down to 0.45 s/wafer using a newly developed shuttle transport system. Within a first experiment, multicrystalline Silicon (mc-Si) PERC solar cells metallized on the rear side with rotary screen printed obtained a mean conversion efficiency of = 19.3 % which is on the same level as reference cells with standard flatbed screen printed rear side metallization ( = 19.3 %). Furthermore, a 9 cell demonstrator module with cells partly metallized on the demonstrator and SmartWire (SWCT) interconnection is presented.