Front grid design for plated contact solar cells

Front grid pattern of standard crystalline solar cells is specifically designed for screen printed silver paste contact. A detailed theoretical analysis of the proposed segmented cross grid line pattern has been carried out for optimizing the spacing and widths of the grid finger, main and sub-bus bars. It is shown that by choosing properly the grid pattern and optimizing the grid parameter, the overall front contact electrical and optical losses can be brought down to 10% or less as compared to the usual loss of 15% or more obtained with the conventional screen printed silver paste technology. Limitation of conventional screen printed contact has been pointed out. It was also observed that the total normalized power loss for segmented mesh grid with plated metal contact, the total power loss can be brought down to 10.04 percent unlike 11.57 for the case of continuous grid and plated contact.