Understanding junction breakdown in multicrystalline solar cells

By O. Breitenstein, J. Bauer, K. Bothe, W. Kwapil, D. Lausch, U. Rau, Jan Schmidt, M. Schneemann, M. Schubert, J. Wagner and 1 more. 2011

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extensive investigations on industrial multicrystalline silicon solar cells have shown that, for standard 1 Ω cm material, acid-etched texturization, and in absence of strong ohmic shunts, there are three different types of breakdown appearing in different reverse bias ranges. Between −4 and −9 V there is early breakdown (type 1), which is due to Al contamination of the surface. Between −9 and −13 V defect-induced breakdown (type 2) dominates, which is due to metal-containing precipitates lying within recombination-active grain boundaries. Beyond −13 V we may find in addition avalanche breakdown (type 3) at etch pits, which is characterized by a steep slope of the I-V characteristic, avalanche carrier multiplication by impact ionization, and a negative temperature coefficient of the reverse current. If instead of acid-etching alkaline-etching is used, all these breakdown classes also appear, but their onset voltage is enlarged by several volts. Also for cells made from upgraded metallurgical grade materia...

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c80830aef2098cb8a86e3ea2de2b719e0007e449

Citations in the corpus

• Explanation of potential-induced degradation of the shunting type by Na decoration of stacking faults in Si solar cells (2014, unknown): “Then the defect would act like the model for type2 breakdown mechanism proposed in [25].”