Solar cells built on dots and dashes of silver

A team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering spoke to Natalie Filatoff about how they reinvented the design of screen-printed contacts to reduce costs and silver consumption without sacrificing the efficiency of tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) solar cells.

By

Natalie Filatoff

04 Oct 2024

Brett Hallam and Yuchao Zhang work in the Solar Industrial Research Facility at UNSW, in Sydney. | Photo: pv magazine/Natalie Filatoff

New research from Australia’s UNSW, published in July 2024, has proposed an established process to help further scale TOPCon solar.The researchers say their approach to solar cell construction – outlined in “Ultra-Lean Silver Screen-Printing for Sustainable Terawatt-Scale Photovoltaic,” published in RRL Solar – could reduce TOPCon silver content from between 12 mg/W and 15 mg/W down to …

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