Silicon Wafer Solar Panel

Finding ways to lower the cost of silicon wafers would increase the demand for solar energy and help grow the domestic solar energy industry.

Silicon wafer solar panel. Screen printing of front and rear surface contacts in the final step of the production process front and rear surface contacts are screen printed onto the surface of the wafer to create the positive and negative contacts of the solar cell. A silicon wafer is the building block of a solar panel. Solar cells are made out of silicon wafers. The wafer is then given an anti reflective coating usually silicon nitride to improve absorption.

To build a monocrystalline or polycrystalline panel wafers are assembled into rows and columns to form a rectangle covered with a glass sheet and framed together. These are made out of the element silicon a hard and brittle crystalline solid that is the second most abundant element in the earth s crust after. Currently over 90 of the current solar cell market is based on silicon. The high cost of silicon wafers has limited the widespread use of photovoltaic solar cells.

Instead of being constructed from solid silicon wafers like mono or poly crystalline solar panels amorphous panels are made by depositing non crystalline silicon on a substrate like glass plastic or metal. One layer of silicon on an amorphous solar panel can be as thin as 1 micrometer which is much thinner than a human hair. The standard process flow of producing solar cells from silicon wafers comprises 9 steps from a first quality check of the silicon wafers to the final testing of the ready solar cell. Today s silicon photovoltaic cells the heart of these solar panels are made from wafers of silicon that are 160 micrometers thick but with improved handling methods the researchers propose this could be shaved down to 100 micrometers and eventually as little as 40 micrometers or less which would only require one fourth as much silicon for a given size of panel.

Monocrystalline and polycrystalline solar panels both monocrystalline and polycrystalline solar panels have cells made of silicon wafers. Processing of silicon wafers into solar cells. Solar cells connected together become solar panels. Silicon solar panels are often referred to as 1 st generation panels as the silicon solar cell technology gained ground already in the 1950s.

Many of the leading manufacturers including jinko longi and canadian solar have aligned with the 182mm format trina solar is pushing the larger 210mm size while longi the world s largest mono silicon wafer manufacture is using both the 166mm and 182mm sizes depending on the application. In the early 2000s solar wafers were small around 125 mm 5 in in length.