Nano-sized glass frits with surface treatment for silicon solar cells

The interfacial structure between silver electrodes and n-type silicon emitters plays a very crucial role for the electrical and mechanical properties of silicon solar cells. Studies show that the residual glass frits layers at the Ag/Si interfaces will hugely increase the contact resistance and this subsequently leads to a decrease in the overall efficiency of the silicon solar cells. In this work, silver-coated glass frits were employed to improve the interfacial conductivity. Transfer length method (TLM) was applied to evaluate the electrical performance of samples made by different glass frits. For samples made with silver-coated glass frits, the improvement of conductivity was found to be about 15% compared to glass frits without any surface treatment. The results indicate that the silver layer on the surface of glass frits provide a conducting channel within the residual insulating layer and therefore reduce overall resistance.