Dispensing Technology Meets CIGS Substrates: First IV-Results with Dispensed Metal Grid on CIGS Mini-Modules

For the first time, the parallel dispensing approach and the CIGS thin-film technology are combined to demonstrate metallization for thin-film PV with low temperature pastes. This article focuses on dispensing three different low temperature pastes through 35 μm and 25 μm nozzle openings, respectively, and applying them on 156 mm x 156 mm CIGS substrates. The screen printed metal grid acts as reference. The achieved contact resistivity values are below 5 mcm². The metal grid on the TCO layer of CIGS substrates obtains an increased short-circuit current density of jsc = 1.1 mA∙cm-², which corresponds to 3.5% current density gain compared to grid-free CIGS modules, and an increased module power of up to 4.6%. Additionally, the Fill Factor is positively affected by the metallization. Paste C shows a promising contact finger geometry with a core finger width of wcore = 25 μm ± 1 μm and an optical aspect ratio of ARo= 0.46 ± 0.02. Following, the dispensing technology has been successfully applied on CIGS mini-modules as a future approach for realizing the metallization with a realistic perspective in terms of scalability for large module sizes.