Low-Cost, Screen-Printed Silver Metal Complex Inks for Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells

Screen printing using metal particle pastes, the current photovoltaic industry metallization standard, provides fast and reliable metal grids for silicon solar cells. Recently, metal complex or reactive metal inks are attracting research interest due to their significantly low cost and higher performance compared to traditional nanoparticle silver pastes. In this work, we demonstrate, for the first time, screen-printed high-efficiency silicon heterojunction solar cells metallized by silver metal complex inks on industrial G1-size (158.75 × 158.75 mm²) wafers. We demonstrate screen-printed Ag metal complex ink grid patterns with continuous fingers ~100–120 μm wide. The printed Ag grid is very thin (~1 μm), which is an order of magnitude thinner than the current ~20–30 μm fingers printed with low-temperature nanoparticle-based pastes. Double printing allows silicon heterojunction devices with efficiencies >20%. This is the highest efficiency so far, to our knowledge, of industrial solar cell precursors using this metallization technology. Simulation results suggested that increasing the thickness of the metal film does not significantly improve efficiency due to the dense, highly conductive films. So, a single print of ~1 μm finger would be enough to produce cells that perform similarly to a ~20 μm thick nanoparticle paste printed cells. Additionally, solar cells printed on G1 wafers with silver metal complex ink required more than 10 times less silver (~0.03 g) compared to those using silver/copper nanoparticle paste (~0.4 g of Ag). These results indicate that metal complex inks are a very promising replacement for silver nanoparticle pastes for industrial-scale metallization in an age of resource scarcity and high costs of noble metals.