Main grid lines and thin grid lines of photovoltaic cells

Do grid lines reduce conductive losses in photovoltaic cells?

The shape of grid lines or fingers, used to reduce conductive losses in photovoltaic cells, is shown to be optimized when the current flux in the line remains constant. This result is derived for cells of arbitrary geometry assuming the fraction of the cell area shaded is small. The shapes of grid lines for three special cases are provided.

Is gridline segmentation a low-cost pathway to industrial solar cells?

Gridline segmentation combined with an uneven busbar concept is investigated. This is a low-cost pathway to achieving industrial solar cells with energy conversion efficiency above 20% without any additional cost.

Does gridline height affect solar cell conversion efficiency?

Chen et al. [ 4] showed that, for a given number of busbars, the gridline height has a negligible impact on the cell conversion efficiency after it reaches a certain value. This suggests that the aspect ratio of the gridlines should also be optimized to design cost-effective solar cells.

How to optimize a solar cell grid pattern?

To optimize the grid pattern in terms of the solar cell efficiency, different grid models [ 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17] have been developed to assess the total series resistance and its components corresponding to the emitter, gridline, busbar, and contact.

Do printed gridlines require a uniform gridline profile?

Therefore, printed gridlines require a uniform gridline profile from busbar to busbar, in conjunction with a high aspect ratio. However, in order to obtain cost-effective solar cells, the metallization costs also have to be considered.

Why is gridline width 90 m?

This means that, to take advantage of the approximation in Eq. ( 10 ), the gridline width has to be ≥ 90 μm, which is contrary to the shrinking gridline width driven by the desire to reduce the silver cost and more advanced printing technologies such as inkjet printing [ 22, 23 ].