Development of a new technique to grow high-quality Si multicrystal Ingot for solar cells

Abstract

We succeeded in development of a new technique to grow high-quality Si multicrystal ingot for solar cells named as "Dendritic casting method", which utilizes the dendrite growth along the bottom of the crucible at the initial stage of directional growth. This method permits to obtain a textured Si multicrystal ingot with large-size grains. Furthermore, its crystal quality was highly maintained from the bottom to top in the ingot, which is a great advantage from a view of a material yield. Solar cells based on this Si multicrystal show high energy conversion efficiencies closing to that of Si single crystal solar cells.