Paste Development for an Optimized Filament Stretching Effect during Parallel Dispensing on Transparent Conductive Oxide Layers for Solar Cell Metallization

The availability of silver as an electrically conductive filler material in printing pastes for solar cell metallization is becoming a more crucial issue for multiterawatt‐scale production due to its global constraints. Therefore, the silver consumption for solar cell production needs to be reduced drastically by substituting silver with alternative conductive filler materials or utilizing process‐specific phenomena. The phenomenon of filament stretching during microextrusion allows significantly lower paste laydowns. The magnitude of filament stretching is paste‐dependent and therefore further knowledge of the pastes’ impact to the filament stretching is required. This study presents nine low‐temperature curing pastes differing in the particle system and binder resin. The rheological and thermal behavior of these suspensions are investigated and printing tests onto silicon heterojunction (SHJ) precursors are carried out. Additionally, scanning electron microscopy (SEM)‐based microstructure analyses of printed electrodes are performed. Based on these experimental results, the impact of paste compositions regarding the paste behavior during microextrusion and the SHJ solar cell performances are analyzed. The developed paste formulations exhibit a strong filament stretching, leading to a reduced silver laydown of down to Δm_Ag = −60%_rel. and an absolute efficiency gain of up to Δη = +0.75%_abs. due to less shading losses.