Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

Investments in large photovoltaic factories can lead to high capital expenditure. To achieve a fast return on investment, it is essential to ensure a high utilization of process equipment. Optimization of photovoltaic factory performance requires a fundamental understanding of the processes as well as of the material flow and manufacturing equipment.

Crystalline wafer and thin-film photovoltaics manufacturing have experienced dramatic expansion in recent years, but future growth requires increasingly effective strategies to reduce costs and increase the competitiveness of PV power. Reducing PV manufacturing costs has been a prime focus of the industry. In the current climate, cost reduction is especially critical given the industry shakeout that many analysts are forecasting.

Inline processing, one of the fastest-growing production processes for crystalline silicon solar cells, uses continuously operated belt furnaces to achieve higher overall throughput compared with traditional batch processing. A second, major advantage of inline processing is improved manufacturing yields through reduced breakage of today’s thinner, increasingly delicate wafers. This is accomplished by eliminating several handling steps unique to batch processing techniques. This paper describes the influence of ECN-Clean, as eveloped by Mallinckrodt Baker and ECN in 2006, whose application increases the efficiency of solar cells produced using inline processing by approximately 0.3 percent absolute, compared with standard inline processing.

With the thin-film silicon industry facing the problems of high-quality material deposition at high rates and narrowing deposition process windows, the “no-drift regime” is an important part of this development. In the case of plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of thin silicon films, the inconstancy of the concentration of silicon-containing particles (SCP) in the plasma leads to changes in deposition conditions, causing a deterioration of film properties, therefore decreasing the performance of the solar cells. During the last few decades, evidence about the process instabilities has been accumulated in different laboratories.

The reliability of United Solar Ovonic (Uni-Solar) triple-junction amorphous-silicon thin-film photovoltaic modules is critical to their success in an increasingly competitive PV market. Modules must show useful operating lifetimes of 20 to 30 years, and although module efficiency is very important, the total energy that a module will produce largely depends on its operating lifetime.

The costs of a photovoltaic installation are driving the market and the need for subsidized schemes, such as feed-in tariffs. Concentrated photovoltaics (CPV) is leading the development of future lowcost renewable energy sources in two ways: on one hand offering high efficiency systems, and on the other, being most capable of reducing manufacturing costs....

Although the entire solar manufacturing industry, from raw materials to finished modules, has enjoyed strong double-digit growth rates over the past several years, few sectors have soared like the amorphous-silicon thin-film photovoltaic equipment space.

Back-sheet materials for photovoltaic modules serve several purposes such as providing electrical insulation, environmental protection and structural support. These functions are essential for modules to be safe for people working near them and for the structures to which they are attached.

A vast majority of silicon solar cells are manufactured using silver paste that is screen printed onto the front side of the wafer and fired to form the front-side contact. Though this method is well established within the industry, it continues to present several areas for potential efficiency improvements.

The use of perfluorinated gases such as NF₃, CF₄ or SF₆ for PECVD (plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition) chamber cleaning has a much higher impact on global warming than does the use of onsite-generated F₂. This holds true even when supposing that in the future much more effort is paid for the correct abatement and a leak-free supply and take-back chain.