Texturing of large area multi-crystalline silicon wafers through different chemical approaches for solar cell fabrication

Surface texturing of silicon can reduce the reflectance of incident light and hence increase the conversion efficiency of solar cells. Comparatively lesser concentrated (10%) standard alkaline (NaOH/KOH) solution does not give good textured multi-crystalline silicon (mc-Si) surface, which could give satisfactory open-circuit voltage. This is due to grain-boundary delineation with steps formed between successive grains of different orientations. In this work an attempt has been made to obtain a well-textured mc-Si surface through three different approaches. The first two are with two different types of acid solutions and the third with concentrated alkaline NaOH. Solutions of HF–HNO3–CH3COOH/H2O system with different concentrations of HF and HNO3 were used for texturing. The results on the effect of texturing of these three solutions on the surface morphology of very large area (125 mm×125 mm) mc-Si wafer as well as on the performance parameters of solar cell are presented in this paper. Attempts have been made to study extensively the surface morphologies of mc-Si wafers in two effective regions of the isoetch curves of the HF:HNO3:diluent's system. Also we studied the reflectance, uniformity, spectral response, short-circuit current, open-circuit voltage, fill factor and dark current–voltage of the cells fabricated using wafers textured with the three different methods. Short-circuit current of the solar cells fabricated using acid-textured wafers were measured to be in the range of 4.93 A. This value is 0.37 and 0.14 A higher than the short-circuit current values measured in the cells fabricated with isotextured and alkaline-textured wafers, respectively.