The field
Silver has been essential to the development of highly efficient PV solar cells, but it is also a scarce material and should be replaced as soon as possible to meet the world energy demands.
State-of-the art technology of highly efficient PV cells, contact passivation and electroplating for the copper contacts will be implemented in this project to achieve this goal. The PV cells will also be tested for the stresses that PV panels normally face in the field installations. This is done via laboratory accelerated stress tests and analysis of degradation modes. With this knowledge, the optimization of the copper contacts industrial process will also be conducted during the project.
Valuable research to society
In order to counteract climate change, the world is in dire need of abundant, renewable energy sources. It takes the Sun 80 minutes to deliver the annual global energy needs and the most efficient way to harvest solar energy is using PV panels. Each PV solar cell uses a very thin layer of silver for their electrical contacts, so the energy generated by the sun can be transferred to the wires and into our homes, but in scale, this becomes a lot of silver.
A more abundant metal, which can replace the silver, is copper, but that has not been developed successfully to date because the industrial processes are not efficient enough and the contacts are not wet developed and tested. Meeting the goals of this project will mean efficient and reliable production of renewable energy to society, less environmental impacts from the PV panel production and lower costs of electricity.
Future of the field
With efficient, industrially scaled, and reliable PV cells with copper contacts, the PV industry could reach a significant reduction of price of electricity, while retaining or even improving the efficiency of the solar energy harvesting.
The CuSun project also combines three areas of expertise from Danish research; PV systems, advanced semiconductor physics, and copper plating. The suggested combination may result in other innovative applications, such as improved optical sensors and photodetectors.
Expected gain
When combined with the benefits of plated contacts and potentially better light absorption of state-of-the-art texturing of the silicon material, the team expects to produce silver-free high-efficiency cells. The silicon texturing in general should improve plating conditions, due to the smaller surface features and less beam coupling in laser processes.
Modeling of lifetime, based on the accelerated stress tests of the new PV cells for different PV installation scenarios and climates are also expected to be achieved in this project, indicating levelized cost of energy and many other practical factors for the PV research and industry community.
Facts
- Official title: CuSun - Electroplating of copper conductor tracks on solar cells
- EUDP investment: 10.063.238 DKK
- Partners: Aarhus Universitet, IPU, and Elplatek
