Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, Vol.133, 148-155, 2015
Novel texturing process for diamond-wire-sawn single-crystalline silicon solar cell
An urgent challenge to popularize diamond-wire-sawn single-crystalline silicon (DWS sc-Si) wafers to PV industry is to develop a proper texture process, specially eliminating its severe saw marks and forming uniform pyramid texture. Using a simple pre-polishing step with TMAH plus routine texture process, the saw marks as well as amorphous silicon layer are removed effectively, thus benefiting the formation of a random pyramid structure on DWS sc-Si wafers, and the texturing mechanism beyond was discussed. With new texture surface, DWS sc-Si cells demonstrated similar reflection similar to 5% and same efficiency level similar to 19.15% to the traditional multi-wire-slurry-sawn solar cells. The techniques present in this article can be easily scaled up in PV industry. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:Diamond-wire sawn;Silicon wafer;Saw marks;Texturing;Silicon solar cell;Power conversion efficiency