Korean Journal of Materials Research ISSN:1225-0562(Print) 2287-7258(Online) 한국재료학회지

Recently, research on cost reduction and efficiency improvement of crystalline silicon(c-Si) photovoltaic(PV) module has been conducted. In order to reduce costs, the thickness of solar cell wafers is becoming thinner. If the thickness of the wafer is reduced, cracking of wafer may occur in high temperature processes during the c-Si PV module manufacturing process. To solve this problem, a low temperature process has been proposed. Conductive paste(CP) is used for low temperature processing; it contains Sn57.6Bi0.4Ag component and can be electrically combined with solar cells and ribbons at a melting point of 150 °C. Use of CP in the PV module manufacturing process can minimize cracks of solar cells. When CP is applied to solar cells, the output varies with the amount of CP, and so the optimum amount of CP must be found. In this paper, in order to find the optimal CP application amount, we manufactured several c-Si PV modules with different CP amounts. The amount control of CP is fixed at air pressure (500 kPa) and nozzle diameter 22G(outer diameter 0.72Ǿ, inner 0.42Ǿ) of dispenser; only speed is controlled. The c-Si PV module output is measured to analyze the difference according to the amount of CP and analyzed by optical microscope and Alpha-step. As the result, the optimum amount of CP is 0.452 ~ 0.544 g on solar cells.