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Design of advanced porous silver powder with high-sintering activity to improve silicon solar cells

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Abstract

Silver (Ag) paste is widely used in semiconductor metallization, especially in silicon solar cells. Ag powder is the material with the highest proportion in Ag paste. The morphology and structure of Ag powder are crucial which determine its characteristics, especially for the sintering activity. In this work, a simple method was developed to synthesize a type of microcrystalline spherical Ag particles (SP-A) with internal pores and the structural changes and sintering behavior were thoroughly studied by combining ultra-small-angle X-ray scattering (USAXS), small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), in-situ heating X-ray diffraction (XRD), focused ion beam (FIB), and thermal analysis measurement. Due to the unique internal pores, the grain size of SP-A is smaller, and the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) is higher than that of traditional solid Ag particles. As a result, the sintering activity of SP-A is excellent, which can form a denser sintered body and form silver nanoparticles at the Ag–Si interface to improve silver silicon contact. Polycrystalline silicon solar cell built with SP-A obtained a low series resistance (Rs) and a high photoelectric conversion efficiency (PCE) of 19.26%. These fill a gap in Ag particle structure research, which is significant for the development of high-performance electronic Ag particles and efficient semiconductor devices.

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Acknowledgments

The author would thank the support of the Soft Science Research Project of Guangdong Province (No. 2017B030301013), the Guangdong Innovative Team Program (No. 2013N080), and the Guangdong Province Major Talent Introducing Program (No. 2021QN020687). USAXS experiments supported by Dr. Feng Tian and BL10U1 beamline at SSRF are also acknowledged.

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  1. Yongsheng Li and Ziwei Chen contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Advanced Materials, Peking University, Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Yongsheng Li, Ziwei Chen, Rui Zhou, Wenguang Zhao, Zhongyuan Huang, Jian Liu, Maolin Yang & Feng Pan

  2. Institute of Advanced Science Facilities, Shenzhen, 518107, China

    Mu Li & Dong Zhou

  3. Institute of Zhejiang University-Quzhou, Quzhou, 324000, China

    Jun Chen

  4. Key Laboratory of Photochemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Yuan Lin

  5. Institute of Materials Research (IMR), Tsinghua University, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Yuhang Li

  6. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Minghan Yu

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  1. Yongsheng Li
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Correspondence to Dong Zhou, Yuan Lin or Feng Pan.

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Li, Y., Chen, Z., Zhou, R. et al. Design of advanced porous silver powder with high-sintering activity to improve silicon solar cells. Nano Res. 17, 3189–3197 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-6163-3

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