The Impact of Impurities on the Relative Efficiencies of Solar Cells from different Silicon Feedstocks

To enhances the efficiency of silicon feedstock, it is important to fully understand the performance behavior of solar cells made from those, especially in the low efficiency sites. Solar cells made from two different feedstocks have been investigate using number of instruments to find the effect of efficiency drop on impurities and imperfections in silicon crystal. It is found that cell regions consisting of dislocation clusters along with number of metallic impurities exhibit low performance to the incident light. Similar finding are obtained from both feedstock materials - a relatively cheap Elkem Solar grade silicon and polysilicon made through Silane process.