Moses Lake Industries, Inc.

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Photovoltaic Fine Lines - Ni / Cu / Sn Electroplating

Cost saving PV technologies that improve productivity, conductivity and solar cell energy efficiency

Silicon photovoltaic cell application challenges
Frontal Grid Metallization plays an important role in the efficiency performance of crystalline solar cells. The current process benchmark of screen printed silver paste lines offers advantages in process simplicity and application speed. However, silver paste's disadvantages include wide metal lines and porous structure which limit overall solar cell efficiency. In addition, rising commodity cost of silver leads to higher overall cost especially for cell designs with higher metal content.

Moses Lake Industry solutions

Enhancing silver paste performance
MLI offers electrolytic plating chemicals that enable Ni / Cu / Sn deposition over fine silver lines. MLI's high purity electroplating chemistry has enhanced wetting properties that allow better penetration of the porous silver lines resulting in an improvement in the overall line conductivity. The chemicals are formulated with a mild pH that do not affect the adhesion performance of printed silver lines. Furthermore, our advanced plating additives produce vertical stacking capabilities that minimize shadowing effects. Silicon based solar cell manufacturers reduce costs by diminishing the amount of silver used while improving the conductivity of the collection grid by over 50% and achieving an efficiency increase of 0.3 to 0.5 percent.

Diverse alternative applications
MLI is also working on other types of silicon-based solar cell production methods. Our 25 years of experience with silicon technologies used by the world's most advanced semiconductor fabricators have provided our product development team a comprehensive understanding of the properties of chemicals on a silicon base. Today, we are working with silver paste and fine line printing manufacturers, that use methods such as inkjet printing, aerosol jet printing, pad printing and laser micro-sintering, to develop products that will electroplate front contact grids for future PV cells.

For more information on our Photovoltaic Plating Chemicals, please contact us.

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