Honeywell recently announced a series of new electronic materials. With these materials, crystalline silicon photovoltaic cell manufacturers can increase the power output of batteries by using advanced and efficient battery designs.
These new materials include dielectrics and dopants commonly used in large-scale semiconductor manufacturing. Honeywell Electronic Materials has been supplying electronic materials to the semiconductor industry for more than 40 years and is now applying this expertise to the photovoltaic industry.
Solar cell efficiency is crucial for photovoltaic manufacturers. Increased efficiency means that panels of the same size will provide higher power output when subjected to the same amount of solar radiation. Therefore, battery efficiency is a key determinant of solar energy costs. Specifically, with these new types of dopants and dielectric materials, manufacturers can apply new technologies in the manufacture of photovoltaic cells, making the cost per watt of electricity produced much lower than current processes.
Dopants are formulation chemicals that can change the electrical properties of silicon materials and can selectively change the electrical characteristics of specific parts of a solar cell. Dielectrics are formulation chemicals that can be used as insulators to prevent current from passing through certain areas of the PV cell. These dielectric materials also have other advantages, for example, they can be used as passivation layers to prevent detrimental composite effects, or they can be used as diffusion barriers to prevent the dopants from diffusing to certain unwanted areas. They can also be used as masking materials. .
Because impurities can degrade the quality of photovoltaic cells, Honeywell designed these new materials to keep the level of impurities at a very low level. The crystalline silicon cell structures that can use Honeywell's new materials include selective emitters, backside passivation, point contacts, and boron back-field BSF cells. In addition, Honeywell's dopants will enable the widespread use of n-type silicon substrates to replace the current dominant p-type silicon, thereby eliminating the adverse effects of p-type silicon photodegradation effects. There are many economical, high-yielding methods that can be used to apply these new materials to silicon wafers, such as screen printing and inkjet printing, as well as other well-established methods already used in the photovoltaic and electronics manufacturing industries.
The development of these photovoltaic manufacturing new materials was completed by Honeywell’s advanced R&D facilities in Sunnyvale, California and Shanghai, China. In addition, Honeywell works closely with research institutes, original equipment manufacturer OEMs, and global photovoltaic cell manufacturers to ensure that these materials are compatible with the large-scale commercial production facilities and meet the process integration requirements of the entire photovoltaic process.
In addition to these new materials, Honeywell's Electronic Materials Division also launched its SOLARC® anti-reflection coating for photovoltaic panels last year, which improves the transmittance of photovoltaic panels, thereby increasing the efficiency and power output of photovoltaic modules.