By Dr. Andreas Kux, Technology Screening and Roadmap of Crystalline Silicon Technology, Q-Cells SE; Dr. Jörg Müller, Crystalline Silicon Cell and Module Development Group Leader, Q-Cells SE
Standard solar cell technology nowadays offers a variety of measures - some linked, some not - to continuously improve conversion efficiency. The starting point for considering the different improvement steps is a kind of standard cell as produced on most current production lines. The main elements of this cell are diffused junction, aluminium back-surface field and screen-print metallization. This type of cell suffers losses from different sources like optics, recombination and resistance that can be considerably lowered to obtain higher cell efficiency. This paper will describe improvement steps on the standard type of multi-crystalline cell before addressing cell concepts that open further potential.
