Silicon-on Ceramic Process. Silicon Sheet Growth and Device Developmentt for the Large-Area Silicon Sheet Task of the Low-Cost Solar Array Project. Quarterly Report No. 13, October 1-December 31, 1979

摘要

Research on the technical and economic feasibility of producing solar-cell-quality sheet silicon by coating inexpensive ceramic substrates with a thin layer of polycrystalline silicon is reported. The coating methods to be developed are directed toward a minimum-cost process for producing solar cells with a terrestrial conversion efficiency of 11 percent or greater. By applying a graphite coating to one face of a ceramic substrate, molten silicon can be caused to wet only that graphite-coated face and produce uniform thin layers of large-grain polycrystalline silicon; thus, only a minimal quantity of silicon is consumed. A variety of ceramic materials have been dip coated with silicon. The investigation has shown that mullite substrates containing an excess of SiO sub 2 best match the thermal expansion coefficient of silicon and hence produce the best SOC layers. With such substrates, smooth and uniform silicon layers 25 cm exp 2 in area have been achieved with single-crystal grains as large as 4 mm in width and several cm in length. Crystal length is limited by the length of the substrate. The thickness of the coating and the size of the crystalline grains are controlled by the temperature of the melt and the rate at which the substrate is withdrawn from the melt. The solar-cell potential of this SOC sheet silicon is promising. To date, solar cells with areas from 1 to 10 cm exp 2 have been fabricated from material with an as-grown surface. Conversion efficiencies of about 10 percent with antireflection (AR) coating have been achieved. Such cells typically have open-circuit voltage and short-circuit current densities of 0.55V and 23 mA/cm exp 2 , respectively. (ERA citation 05:027074)