Silicon solar cells are the most broadly utilized of all solar cell due to their high photo-conversion efficiency even as single junction photovoltaic devices. Besides, the high relative abundance of silicon drives their preference in the PV landscape.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative Policies and ethics Silicon (Si) is the dominant solar cell manufacturing material because it is the second most plentiful material on earth (28%), it provides material stability, and it has well-developed industrial production and solar cell fabrication technologies.
Silica is utilized to create metallurgical grade silicon (MG-Si), which is subsequently refined and purified through a number of phases to create high-purity silicon which can be utilized in the solar cells. The silicon is first extracted from beach sand. Sand mining is only carried out on a few numbers of beaches throughout the globe.
As one of the PV technologies with a long standing development history, the record efficiency of silicon solar cells at lab scale already exceeded 24% from about 20 years ago (Zhao et al., 1998).
One of the most important improvements was the introduction of silicon purification techniques that resulted in a higher quality semiconductor material with fewer impurities, which had a direct impact on increasing the efficiency of PV cells.
Greater automation, quality control and lower energy consumption have led to advances in production processes, resulting in more efficient production lines and better-quality PV modules. Today, silicon PV cells dominate the market due to their reliability, longevity and increasing efficiency, which is why this analysis focuses on them.