INVESTIGATION OF TRANSPARENT CONDUCTIVE ELECTRODES FOR APPLICATION IN HETEROJUNCTION SILICON WAFER SOLAR CELLS

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the fabrication, characterisation and analysis of transparent conductive electrodes, aiming at high-quality front electrodes for application in heterojunction silicon wafer solar cells. Indium tin oxide (ITO) is the material of interest, which is deposited by both pulsed DC and RF sputtering methods. The correlations between the microstructures and the ITO material properties are investigated by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Based on an analysis of the XPS results, the darkening effect of ITO, the influences of deposition power and hydrogen gas are explored and elaborated. In addition, the influence of sputter induced damages on the performance of heterojunction silicon solar cells is studied. Besides ITO, a novel mesh material formed by silver nanoparticles is also investigated in this thesis. A hybrid structure formed by superimposing the silver mesh with a thin ITO layer is demonstrated to have the potential to strongly enhance the conductivity of the electrode.