Ultra-Lean silver screen printing

Ran Chen¹, Li Wang¹, Sisi Wang¹, Catherine Chan¹, Kuninori Okamoto²,

Yiwei Ao², Dongliang Wang², Marwan Dhamrin^3,4, Tsuji Kosuke³,

Weiguang Yang⁵, Brett Hallam¹

¹ School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, U NSW, Australia

²Changzhou Fusion New Materials

³Toyo Aluminium K.K., Japan

⁴Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan

⁵Jolywood (Taizhou) Solar Technology

E-mail: ran.chen@unsw.edu.au

Abstract

The rapid expansion of photovoltaic (PV) deployment demands urgent solutions to reduce reliance  on  silver,  a  critical  and  costly  material  in  solar  cell  manufacturing.  This  work introduces a silver-lean metallisation strategy featuring UNSW’s novel dash design, which decouples metal-silicon contact formation from metal finger conductivity and enables ultra- low silver usage. Through low-temperature processing with copper-based pastes and high- temperature co-firing with aluminium, the approach achieves silver consumption as low as 2 mg/W, an 84% reduction. Experimental results on industrial TOPCon precursors demonstrate efficiencies above 25% with minimal recombination and resistive losses. This novel design offers a scalable pathway toward sustainable, terawatt-scale PV manufacturing.

Keywords: Silicon solar cell; TOPCon; Screen print; Silver consumption; PV sustainability

Biography:

Dr. Ran Chen is a senior research associate at School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Australia. Her research has been focusing on the investigation and mitigation of defects in both p- and n-type commercial silicon solar cells and novel methods to reduce the scarce materials (e.g. silver) used in solar cells, with her recent focus has been on improving the long-term sustainability of the PV industry. Dr Chen has been awarded >$10M funding with three granted patents and 5 PhD students to completion.