Zou Xingli, Ji Li, Ge Jianbang, Sadoway Donald R, Yu Edward T, Bard Allen J
Center for Electrochemistry, Department of Chemistry, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.
State Key Laboratory of Advanced Special Steel & Shanghai Key Laboratory of Advanced Ferrometallurgy & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China.
Nat Commun. 2019 Dec 18;10(1):5772. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-13065-w.
Crystalline-silicon solar cells have dominated the photovoltaics market for the past several decades. One of the long standing challenges is the large contribution of silicon wafer cost to the overall module cost. Here, we demonstrate a simple process for making high-purity solar-grade silicon films directly from silicon dioxide via a one-step electrodeposition process in molten salt for possible photovoltaic applications. High-purity silicon films can be deposited with tunable film thickness and doping type by varying the electrodeposition conditions. These electrodeposited silicon films show about 40 to 50% of photocurrent density of a commercial silicon wafer by photoelectrochemical measurements and the highest power conversion efficiency is 3.1% as a solar cell. Compared to the conventional manufacturing process for solar grade silicon wafer production, this approach greatly reduces the capital cost and energy consumption, providing a promising strategy for low-cost silicon solar cells production.
在过去几十年里，晶体硅太阳能电池一直主导着光伏市场。一个长期存在的挑战是硅片成本在整个组件成本中占比很大。在此，我们展示了一种简单的工艺，可通过在熔盐中进行一步电沉积过程，直接从二氧化硅制备高纯度太阳能级硅膜，用于可能的光伏应用。通过改变电沉积条件，可以沉积出具有可调膜厚和掺杂类型的高纯度硅膜。通过光电化学测量，这些电沉积硅膜的光电流密度约为商用硅片的40%至50%，作为太阳能电池时最高功率转换效率为3.1%。与传统的太阳能级硅片生产制造工艺相比，这种方法大大降低了资本成本和能源消耗，为低成本硅太阳能电池的生产提供了一种有前景的策略。
