Integrating Industrial Black Silicon

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UNSW Sydney has received a funding grant from ARENA to investigate and optimise the compatibility of emerging high-throughput black silicon texturing techniques with existing and next-generation solar cell production processes.The Integrating Industrial Black Silicon project will work towards reducing the costs of solar cell modules by enabling lower cost and less wasteful wafer fabrication methods and by improving anti-reflection and light-trapping properties of multicrystalline silicon solar cells.Key resultsResearchers at UNSW developed advanced characterization techniques to measure complex black silicon surface morphologies. These techniques have allowed for a greater understanding of the fundamental nature of black silicon and its interaction with solar cell processing steps.The project created and validated new modelling techniques that allow the optical performance of black silicon textures to be rapidly predicted. These models have been integrated with widely available software enabling the annual energy yield of black silicon textured devices to be determined within minutes (rather than many hours with incumbent modelling techniques).Together with its industry partner Canadian Solar, this project successfully demonstrated the integration of industrial black silicon textures into stable, high efficiency solar cells. Fundamental studies showed the solar cell processing modifications needed to achieve high performance and provided insights into the suppression of degradation losses.

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