Electrical and optical analysis of a spray coated transparent conductive adhesive for two-terminal silicon based tandem solar cells

Abstract

This work presents the results of the electrical and optical characterization of a new transparent conductive adhesive (TCA) that combines the techniques of spray pyrolysis and a sol-gel like process. This approach is of particular interest since the adhesive itself forms both the electrical and the mechanical interconnection of the bonded sub-cells. The electrical and optical characterization of the developed TCA shows a minimum connecting resistivity of 17 Ωcm2 and a simulated reflection at the Si-TCA interface of ≈ 20%. By coating both substrate surfaces with a TiO2 anti reflection coating (ARC), the reflectance at the Si-TCA interface was successfully reduced down to <5%. The efficiency potential of a glued dual junction device was simulated in dependence of the electrical and optical properties of the TCA. The reported values of 17 Ωcm2 connecting resistivity and 20% reflection limit the device efficiency to 22.3% (71% of the maximum achievable efficiency). Reducing the reflection to below 5%, as practically demonstrated in this paper, allows to increase this value to 25.3% (>80% of maximum), while additionally reducing the connecting resistivity to 10 Ωcm2 or 1 Ωcm2 allows for a further increase to 27.3% and 30.0%, respectively.