Spatially resolved contact-resistance applications and measurements on crystalline silicon solar cells

This paper demonstrates a method for quantitatively determining the spatially resolved contact resistance of silicon solar cells. Contact-resistance maps obtained by this technique on screen-printed industrial silicon solar cells are presented and discussed. Extending the contact-resistance map to a series-resistance map by adding contributions from the rear, bulk, emitter, and metallization shows this map to qualitatively agree well with photoluminescence (PL) series-resistance imaging. Compared to existing approaches, our technique enables the spatially resolved measurement of the contact resistance separately from any other series-resistance contributions.