Methods for testing the strength of silicon wafers are also applicable to silicon solar cells. The 4-point bending setup is most commonly used in the literature for testing wafer strength. It loads a large area homogeneously by uniaxial bending moments including the surface and edges of the sample.
Next, we fabricated the foldable c-Si wafers into solar cells. The most widely used industrial silicon solar cells include passivated emitter and rear cells 18, tunnelling oxide passivated contact 19 solar cells and amorphous–crystalline silicon heterojunction 20 (SHJ) solar cells.
Since the strength behavior of the sunny side of the solar cells is independent of loading direction, one can conclude that solar cells fail as texturized silicon wafers due to defects in silicon without influence of the metallization. However, on the backside, the strength strongly depends on loading direction.
In addition, many silicon solar cell manufacturers do not fabricate the wafers, but purchase them, and it is of great interest for both the vendor and the manufacturer to have the capability to measure the minority-carrier lifetime of the individual bare wafers.
The volume includes the chapters that present new results of research aimed to improve efficiency, to reduce consumption of materials and to lower cost of wafer-based silicon solar cells as well as new methods of research and testing of the devices.
This fact enabled us to improve the flexibility of silicon wafers by blunting the pyramidal structure in the marginal regions. This edge-blunting technique enables commercial production of large-scale (>240 cm 2), high-efficiency (>24%) silicon solar cells that can be rolled similarly to a sheet of paper.