Category
Engineering and Computer Science
Faculty Mentor
Dr. Kristopher Davis
Faculty Mentor Primary Department
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Year of Presentation
2020
Project Abstract, Summary, or Creative Statement
Silicon solar cells have been in development for the past century for their renewable energy potential. Screen printed contact has been widely used in industrial solar cell fabrications. Previous study has shown that the firing temperature has an significant impact on the formation of the metal-Si interface. Additionally, recent work has shown that contact resistance (pc) can also be affected by the physical dimensions of test structure design. It is crucial to be able to accurately quantify pc at the metal-Si interface. This project studies the influence of firing temperature as well as the influence of test structure design on pc of the formed metal-Si interface. Our research objective is to compare two different silicon solar structures, the TLM structure and thin TLM structure, in the basis of firing. We show that the by changing the firing temperature, pc significantly decreases with increasing firing temperature, from 1.199 mohm-cm2 to 0.7107 mohm-cm2. Furthermore, we demonstrate that decreasing the contact width in the TLM structure leads to an increased pc. When the contact width decreased from 2.403mm to 0.299mm, the pc decreased from 82.235 mohm-cm2 to 7.1309 mohm-cm2. This information provides more insights of the screen printed contact and can be used to optimize the H-pattern design of Si solar cells, reduce resistive loss and improve the solar cell efficiency.
Keywords
Photovoltaics, Solar Cells, Renewable Energy
Included in
Power and Energy Commons, Semiconductor and Optical Materials Commons, Structural Materials Commons
Characterization of contact resistance properties of different TLM structure designs