Performance of solar cells fabricated from cast quasi-single crystalline silicon ingots

•We comprehensively studied the performance of solar cells from whole QSC-Si ingots.•The advantage of QSC-Si solar cells lies in the use of alkaline texturing.•The cell efficiency difference between alkaline and acidic texturing is up to 1.05%.•The efficiency reduces by 1.11% as single crystal ratio decreases from 100% to 50%.•QSC-Si cells have a wider range of efficiency distribution than mc-Si and CZ-Si cells.

We comprehensively investigated the performance of solar cells made from quasi-single crystalline silicon (QSC-Si) cast by the seed-assisted directional solidification (DS) method and its relationship with the area ratio of 〈1 0 0〉 -oriented single crystal of a QSC-Si wafer. It is found that the cell performance improvement triggered by alkaline texturing is more notable for the QSC-Si wafers with a morphology of higher 〈1 0 0〉 -oriented single crystal ratio, and the difference in cell efficiency between alkaline and acidic texturing is up to an absolute value of 1.05%. As the single crystal ratio of the QSC-Si wafer decreases from 100% to 50%, the cell efficiency decreases from 18.15% to 17.04%. We also compared the performance of typical CZ-Si solar cells and the QSC-Si solar cells made from wafers with fully 〈1 0 0〉 -oriented single crystal. It is found that the average efficiency of QSC-Si solar cells is about 0.8% absolutely lower than that of the CZ-Si solar cells, and it has a substantially wider range of distribution due to dislocation propagation.