High Efficiency Passivated Emitter Rear Contact Solar Cells with Diamond Wire Saw Multi-crystalline Silicon wafers.

During recent years, diamond wire sawn (DWS) multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) wafers have been widely used to reduce the production costs; however, these wafers need additional process treatments such as reactive ion etching (RIE) or metal-catalysed chemical etching (MCCE) to form a surface with relatively low reflectivity. Although the absolute power conversion efficiency of the solar cell could be improved by 0.3-0.5% through the introduction of such surface treatments, the production costs would also be increased. In this study, an improved production-scale acidic texturization with additives is used to texture the surfaces of DWS mc-Si wafers, giving a similar weighted averaged reflectance (WAR) of 19.69% as slurry-cut wafers. The effect of the texturization process on the surface morphology, WAR and performance of the DWS mc-Si cells is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]