Abstract:
The gap between laboratory scale and commercial silicon solar cells is wider as many standard processes are not being practiced in transforming to commercialization. The main objective of this work is to investigate the standard as well as simplified fabrication process applicability to commercially available low-cost silicon wafers. Therefore, it is urgently needed to put an intermediate step in between lab-scale fabrication and fully automated commercial facilities or processes. Eventually, smaller fabrication facilities may be benefitted from these comparative studies and get involved in more human resource extensive with commercially available low-cost silicon wafer. Efficiency was achieved to be 5.96% which proves viability of the approach. This study mainly focused on the investigation of effects of standard fabrication processes to commercially available low-cost silicon wafers therefore conversion efficiency was just regarded as the benchmark. However, a series of other characterization found some correlation between processing steps and quality of layers/devices, which can be considered as the contribution of the study. The relatively lower efficiency was probably caused by the complete procedure in a non-cleanroom environment with in-housebuilt low cost instruments, where thorough optimization of the process is needed. Therefore, it is believed that the efficiency can be improved by the use of standard clean room, alternate procedure of edge isolation, improvement of rapid thermal annealing procedure etc. This work thus showed the bridging gap between small scale laboratory solar cells (crystalline silicon based) with the commercial prototypes produced from extensive knowledge in each processing steps.
