A Study of Interfacial Wettability of Glass Spreading on a Silicon Substrate

This paper considers glass used for crystalline silicon solar cells as the research object, exploring the wetting behavior of glass spreading on a silicon substrate. A method is proposed to evaluate the wettability of glass. The characteristic temperature points and melting process of glass were recorded using a hot-stage microscope. The melting footage was processed using MATLAB. The specific steps included establishing a pixel coordinate in the video with MATLAB, and the reference point slope ( k ) was monitored in real time. The k curve was subsequently fitted via Fourier transform, and the derivative of the time value was taken. It was found that the better the sample wettability, the closer the R 2 (goodness of fit) value was to 1. Meanwhile, two types of glass melting modes were identified through the results yielded by the hot-stage microscope. The difference between the two modes was the formation of a spherical shape during the melting process. Through the combination of the MATLAB analysis and the hot-stage microscope results, it was found that when the sample had a spherical temperature, the value of ∂ k ∂ t was partially larger than 0 and partially smaller than 0. However, when the sample did not have a spherical temperature, the values of ∂ k ∂ t were all less than 0. In addition, other experimental phenomena were observed by SEM and EDS, which highlight the difference in wettability between the two models.