Controlling the defects of mc-Si ingot in industrial scale during crystallization

In this article, mc-Si ingots are grown in industrial scale with directional solidification method. The ingot quality can be controlled by tuning the solidification rates. The defect fraction of which evaluated by photoluminescence and lifetime images are used to estimate ingot quality. The results show that the defect can be suppressed significantly during crystallization, leading to the improvement of solar cell performance. Under identical solar cell fabrication process, the whole-ingot-input cell efficiency is increased from 17.68% to17.79%.