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DEVELOPMENT at LUXOR 

PV Evolution

The drastic rise in oil prices and the growing realisation by industry, politics and consumers in the limited availability of fossil fuels have given an enormous boost to the photovoltaic industry and has considerably increased the pace of innovation cycles. The boom in the sector, which achieved world-wide sales of EUR5.8B last year with growth rates of 40%, has ultimately led to a world-wide bottleneck in the availability of the raw material, silicon.
Science and research into the advancement of photovoltaics is currently making enormous progress in the technology by achieving greater efficiencies, lower specific requirements for silicon in the production of solar cells and an overall reduced use of material in the manufacturing process. Scientists around the world are also working on solar cells that operate without even the thin layer of silicon.

Perspectives in research and development

To save raw materials, the production of thinner wafers and their processing to make solar cells is under investigation. Even larger wafer formats are being used. The previous standard (125x125 mm) is currently being replaced by the 156x156 mm format and intensive work is underway on an even larger format (210x210 mm). The efficiency of low-cost silicon materials and processes can be increased, e.g. using getter and passivation steps to obtain material improvement. The surface of multicrystalline silicon could also be passivated and textured using suitable processes. Solar cells of the next generation will certainly have more efficient contact structures. As a result, work is progressing on fine-line screen-printing and embedded contacts, the contacting of large thin wafers, new kinds of back-side contacts and complete back-side cells.

Orientation of solar cell production to the solar module

The development of new concepts and production techniques in solar cell manufacture aims at improvements in further processing. Module-oriented solar cell structures, such as the back-side contact mentioned above as well as cross-industry approaches to integrated solar cell-module concepts, are providing additional synergies in a variety of value-added steps. For example, the Dutch research institute ECN has significantly expanded the concept of the MWT cell, so that solar cells can be plugged into a type of printed circuit with contact pins to interconnect modules, to name just one of several approaches.

The PV future remains exiting.