Trina Solar has announced that its State Key Laboratory (SKL) of photovoltaic (PV) science and technology (PVST) has fabricated Passivated Emitter Rear Cells (PERC) with a 23.39% power conversion efficiency rate by using only standard manufacturing equipment.

The China-based solar cell and module manufacturer said that to the best of their knowledge, this was the highest conversion efficiency confirmed by ISO/IEC 17025 certified calibration laboratory for such an industrial cell.

“Our aim is to develop processes that can be transferred to production; therefore, we decided to fabricate such champion PERC cells purely on equipment that is part of standard manufacturing lines, like metallization with standard screen-printers,” said Yang Yang, director of the PERC research group at SKL.

Trina Solar said that the bifacial cell, with an area of 252 cm^2 and 9 busbars, was calibrated at ISFH CaLTeC in Germany under full area illumination (with full front metallization taken into account) on a brass chuck contacting the whole rear area.

It added that the only way the process differed from standard mass-production methods was that during deposition of the antireflection coating, parameters were adjusted as slightly as possible, so the cell has the improved light trapping properties during calibration in the air as the cell has when encapsulated in a module

Previously, Trina Solar announced that its state key laboratory of PV science and technology in China had set a new world record of achieving high efficiency of 24.58% for n-type monocrystalline silicon (c-Si, i-TOPCon solar cell (Industrial Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact). The bifacial solar cell reached a total-area front side efficiency of 24.58%, without using any dedicated aperture during the illumination, a result independently confirmed by the ISFH Cal Tec in Germany, the company has said in a statement.

According to Mercom’s recently released India Solar Market Leaderboard 1H 2019, in the first half of this year (1H 2019), Trina Solar, Adani, and Risen Energy were the top three suppliers of solar modules in India in terms of shipments.