Characterization and Optimization of the Contact Formation for High-Performance Silicon Solar Cells

In this paper, p-n junction formation using screen-printed metalization and co-firing is used to fabricate high-efficiency solar cells on single- crystalline silicon substrates. In order to form high-quality contacts, co-firing of a screen-printed Ag grid on the front and Al on the back surface field is implemented. These contacts require low contact resistance, high conductivity, and good adhesion to achieve high efficiency. Before co-firing, a statistically designed experiment is conducted. After the experiment, a neural network (NN) trained by the error back-propagation algorithm is employed to model the crucial relationships between several input factors and solar cell efficiency. The trained NN model is also used to optimize the beltline furnace process through genetic algorithms.