Wet-texturing process for a thin crystalline silicon solar cell at low cost with high efficiency

In the wet-texturing process, a smaller etch depth of 8 µm was established on each side of the thin silicon wafer. Formation of a very small size (1–3 µm) pyramidal structure was confirmed on a thin c-Si surface through the use of SEM micrographs. For this silicon surface with small pyramidal structures, a surface reflectance of 15.14% was observed. Saw damage removal was employed for the second and the third sets of silicon wafers in a NaOH (8 wt%) solution, and the wafers were then textured in a mixture of NaOH (1.5 wt%), de-ionized water and Isopropyl alcohol (IPA, 6–8 wt%) at 80 °C for 18 min and 24 min, respectively. In this process, the scraped depths were 16 and 26 µm on each side of the second and the third sets of silicon wafers, and the pyramidal sizes were 4–9 µm and 9–12 µm respectively. We found that the reflectances of these sets of wafers were 14.98% and 14.78%, respectively. Our novel approach of ultrasonic cleaning, hot de-ionized water treatment, and texturing for thin c-Si wafers yielded small-sized (1–3 µm) uniform pyramidal structure that were stable and suitable for metalized screen printing. Even though the reflectance was high for the first set of wafers the illuminated current-voltage (LIV) measurements confirmed the wafers’ superiority over the conventional textured c-Si solar cells in terms of the open-circuit voltage and the fill factor. The small-size pyramidal-structured thin single-crystalline silicon solar cells showed a 17.9% efficiency. Since no NaOH solution was used for saw damage removal in the first set of silicon wafers, the production cost for commercial production of large-area single-crystalline silicon solar cells was reduced by nearly 20%.