Do the Weight and the Growth Rate of Multicrystalline Silicon Ingots Influence the Efficiencies of solar Cells?

The further development of manufacturing solar silicon ingots is one of the more important issues to guarantee the growth of the photovoltaic industry. Savings in manufacturing costs of ingots, wafers, solar cells and of modules are prerequisites. Therefore, two of the main targets of the PV industry today are to increase the weight and to speed up the growth rate of multicrystalline silicon ingots. During recent years ingots with 150, 240 and recently more than 300 kg have been developed and are produced today. The state of the art growth rate is 0.5 to 1.5 cm/h. To increase weight and growth rate new furnaces and crystallization processes have been developed. Differences in the properties of the bulk material, the wafers and the cells produced from 240 kg and 400 kg ingots will be discussed. Results of very large 400 kg ingots and ingots grown with more than 2.0 cm/h will be presented