Progress in thick-film pad printing technique for solar cells

The aim of this work was to study the suitability of pad printing in connection with fine-line printing on solar cells. Pad printing is a kind of gravure offset printing technique that offers the possibility of a simple, economic and high throughput production of fine lines up to 32μm even on uneven surfaces, which is not possible with traditional screen printing (Hahne et al., Proceedings of the Second World Conference on Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conversion, Vienna, 1998, p. 1646). The different inks and silicone rubber pads have been characterised by several methods like thermal analysis, rheological, hardness and surface tension measurement. Simple solar cells on multicrystalline wafers with rapid thermal sintering show efficiencies up to 13.4%.