During EU PVSEC, Meyer Burger’s subsidiary, Roth & Rau will be presenting a new front and rear side c-Si solar cell process that employs nickel within busbar metallisation for electrical contacts, which is claimed to save on silver usage between 50 and 70%, dependent on the contact technology deployed.

The company said that the new process, used with its HELiA system that was developed primarily for the production of high efficiency heterojunction cells was available immediately.

The HELiA system is said to enable both the front and rear cell surfaces to be coated and processed simultaneously, further reducing costs.

Development work using nickel was said to have demonstrated excellent adhesion of the cell connectors to the front and rear surfaces with standard industry soldering processes.

This would enable the metallisation of the cell fingers to be undertaken irrespective of the electrical characteristics of the busbar, allowing full optimization and de-couples the fingers from the solderability of the busbar. This ability allows the adoption of new pastes compositions and metallisation processes that do could improve the reliability of the soldering process.

Meyer Burger said that the performance of cells coated with this new process were comparable with conventional screen printing processes.