High-Efficient Solar Cells by the Ag/Cu-Assisted Chemical Etching Process on Diamond-Wire-Sawn Multicrystalline Silicon

In this paper, we presented a novel low-cost method for diamond-wire-sawn (DWS) multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) wafer texturation based on the metal-assisted chemical etching process with Ag/Cu dual elements and nanostructure rebuilding (NSR) treatment to remove the saw marks and to realize uniform invert pyramid textured structures. Benefiting from both the increased optical absorption and better passivation, an efficiency of 18.71% for invert pyramid mc-Si solar cells from a DWS wafer with a standard size of 156 x 156 mm(2) was obtained, which was 0.58% and 2.33% absolutely higher than that (18.13%) of the traditional mc-Si solar cell and than that (16.38%) of the black mc-Si solar cell without NSR treatment, respectively.