Photovoltaic manufacturing technology monolithic amorphous silicon modules on continuous polymer substrates. Annual technical progress report, July 5, 1996--December 31, 1997

Iowa Thin Film Technologies, Inc.`s (ITF) goal is to develop the most cost effective PV manufacturing process possible. To this end the authors have chosen a roll based manufacturing process with continuous deposition and monolithic integration. Work under this program is designed to meet this goal by improving manufacturing throughput and performance of the manufactured devices. Significant progress was made during Phase 2 of this program on a number of fronts. A new single pass tandem deposition machine was brought on line which allows greatly increased and improved throughput for rolls of tandem material. The TCO deposition process was improved resulting in an increase in throughput by 20%. A new alignment method was implemented on the printing process which improves throughput six fold while improving alignment from 100 {micro}m to 10 {micro}m. A roll based lamination procedure was developed and implemented on selected products which improves throughput from 20 sq. ft./hr. to 240 sq. ft./hr. A wide range of lower cost encapsulants were evaluated. A promising material was selected initially to be introduced in 5 year lifetime type products. The sum of these improvements bring the overall cost reduction resulting from this program to 49%