Progress in thick-film pad printing technique for solar cells

The aim of this work was to study the suitability of pad printing in connec tion with fine-line printing on solar cells. Pad printing is a kind of grav ure offset printing technique that offers the possibility of a simple, econ omic and high throughput production of fine lines up to 32 mum even on unev en surfaces, which is not possible with traditional screen printing (Hahne et al., Proceedings of the Second World Conference on Photovoltaic Solar En ergy Conversion, Vienna, 1998, p. 1646). The different inks and silicone ru bber 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 u p to 13.4%. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.