Crystalline silicon PV technology has been the dominant PV technology for the past three decades.
The conventional silicon PV cell manufacturing process involves a series of steps like surface texturing, diffusion, edge isolation, phospho-silicate glass removal, deposition of antireflective coating (ARC), contact printing, metallization, and testing. Know more about the PV Cell manufacturing process here.
In order to fabricate high-efficiency solar cells, it is important to optimize these processes. The deposition of an antireflective coating (ARC) on the wafer is one such critical process, which helps to reduce the reflection of light and to increase the passivation. (Surface Passivation is a technology that increases the PV Cell's energy conversion efficiency.)
PV industries use different materials such as ARCs like silicon nitride (SiN), silicon oxide (SiO2) and titanium oxide (TiO2), etc. Among these, silicon nitride (SiN) is the predominantly used ARC film in silicon PV industries.
Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) is generally preferred as the processing technique to deposit silicon nitride films on the silicon wafers.
The ARC films are blue in color and the optical properties of ARC can be
tailored by changing the process parameters such as glass flows, deposition rate, etc.
For further studies:
S. Saravanan, Meera Mahadevan, Prakash Suratkar and E.V. Gijo (2012) Efficiency improvement on the multi-crystalline silicon wafer through six sigma methodology, International Journal of Sustainable Energy 31:3.
Rabindra Satpathy and Venkateswarlu Pamuru (2021) Solar PV Power, Design, Manufacturing, and Applications from Sand to Systems: Academic Press.
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