Showing papers by "Guy Beaucarne published in 2004"
TL;DR: In this article, an overview and analysis of research on thin-film polycrystalline Si solar cells on foreign substrates, with layers formed at intermediate temperatures (700-1300°C), covering substrates and deposition techniques and solar cell processing is given.
Abstract: We give an overview and analysis of research on thin-film polycrystalline Si solar cells on foreign substrates, with layers formed at intermediate temperatures (700–1300 °C), covering substrates, deposition techniques and solar cell processing. The main deposition techniques that have been investigated are solution growth (SG) and chemical vapour deposition (CVD). Insufficient nucleation on foreign substrates is an important problem with SG, which could be solved with appropriate surface preparation techniques and growth conditions. With CVD, continuous layers are achieved routinely, but the electronic quality of the material is usually very low. Solar cell performance appears to be limited by a very large recombination activity of grain boundaries. Improvement can be achieved reducing the grain boundary density and recombination activity, and experimental examples are given. Devices have been demonstrated with efficiencies up to 5.5%.
42 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a thin film monocrystalline silicon solar cells based on porous silicon (PS) layer transfer processes could be cost-effective because of their lower consumption of material use and the potential for high efficiency.
31 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suggest a dependency on the characteristics of the materials involved in the reaction, focusing particularly on the different reactivity of a-Si deposited with different deposition techniques (e-beam evaporation vs. PECVD).
29 citations
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: In this paper, the European project METEOR aims at the development of large-grained poly-Si thin-film solar cells on foreign substrates, and two different concepts have been investigated: (i) a low-temperature approach using glass substrates (T 1000°C), the surface roughness of the ceramic substrates has a negative impact on the ALILE process.
Abstract: The European project METEOR aims at the development of large-grained poly-Si thin-film solar cells on foreign substrates. A two step process has been used to form the poly-Si films: (1) a thin large-grained poly-Si film (seed layer) is prepared by the aluminium-induced layer exchange (ALILE) process and (2) this seed layer is subsequently used as a template for an epitaxial thickening process. Two different concepts have been investigated: (i) a low-temperature approach using glass substrates (T 1000°C). The surface roughness of the ceramic substrates has a negative impact on the ALILE process. The surface roughness can be reduced by the deposition of an additional oxide layer. At high temperatures thermal CVD has successfully been used for epitaxy. At low temperatures about 73% of the area under investigation have been epitaxially thickened by a 400nm ECRCVD grown film because of the preferential (100) orientation of the seed layer. First poly-Si thin-film solar cells have been prepared at low and high temperatures. The best solar cell so far has reached an open circuit voltage of 428mV and an efficiency of 4.2%.
1 citations