Silicon solar cells and modules with front contact paste containing copper-based component

In this article, we present the results of aging tests of silicon photovoltaic modules with a copper-containing electrode deposited in one-step screen printing method. For front metallization, a mixture of commercial silver paste with copper filler was used, where copper constituted 30% of total paste volume. The filler is based on copper particles about 1 mu m of diameter covered with a protective coating layer based on nickel (CCu1) or nickel-silver (CCu2). For the first time, Si solar cells with screen-printed front electrode containing massive copper with efficiency over 20% are reported. Aging tests included 2000 h of damp heat (DH) and 400 times of thermal cycling (TC) tests. TC results are very promising and provide slight deterioration of the electrical parameters of the modules with both CCu1 and CCu2. Greater decreases were found when performed DH tests, but it is worth pointing out that mainly fill factor (FF) and eta have fallen while V-oc and I-sc did not change by more than 5% for both pastes. After 2000 h of the test, FF decreased by 28% for CCu1 and 37.4% for CCu2, whereas the efficiency deteriorated by 32% and 42.6% for CCu1 and CCu2. The electroluminescence (EL) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements suggest that decrease in electrical parameters is a consequence of Cu corrosion caused by harmful products of the decomposed EVA laminating film.