Hydrogenated Bifacial PERL Silicon PV Cells

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The UNSW School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering has received a funding grant from ARENA to conduct a research and development project which address the performance and cost limitations of current PERC technology by transformation into PERL technology for industrial environments by incorporating multiple separately proven technologies.Hydrogen passivation will be used to neutralise defects in the silicon material and laser doping and bifacial plating will be used for a low-cost implementation of a PERL structure.Key resultsThe processes developed in this project have been transferred to an industrial partner and they have fabricated such cells using industrial equipment and reaching efficiencies of up to 23%.Both types of cells have been light soaked to test for Light Induced Degradation (LID). Using an industry standard light soaking process, the cells lose less than 1% relative efficiency due to LID. A 21.3% bifacial module of bifacial plated PERC cells has also been made.Future work will involve further optimisation of the industrial prototype tools to achieve desired and reliable plating metallization in not only Passivated Emitter, Rear Locally (PERL) diffused cell, but also other types of high efficiency solar cells (e.g. TOPCon, SHJ).

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