I-Corps: Copper-Based Nanowire Pastes for Solar Panels

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to potentially replace reduce the costs of solar panel, enabling wider spread adoption. Solar panel manufacturing depends heavily on conductive pastes in the manufacture of the conductive busbars and finger grids on the top of solar panels, with the market potential for the conductive pastes being currently estimated to be about $2 billion and its growth at a CAGR of 4%. With silver components accounting for close to 20% of the current photovoltaic solar cell costs, 100-fold cheaper copper pastes can substantially reduce the manufacturing cost. New materials developments have led to increases in copper paste sales and usages. Commercialization of this technology offers an opportunity to accelerate the demand for solar panels by supplying high-performance conductive pastes to solar panel manufacturers at attractive prices.This I-Corps project focuses on determining the commercialization feasibility of a high performance and low-cost copper nanowire paste technology to help photovoltaic solar panel manufacturers who suffer from the pain of high-cost silver paste that requires high processing temperature and is subject to corrosion of silver grid fingers to degrade the electrical performance. Customer discovery will be performed to test a number of initial hypotheses, identify the market opportunity, and develop the business model. Manufacturing of silicon-based solar cells involves screen printing of conductive silver pastes as front electrodes to provide good contact and efficient electrical performance. Major barriers include high cost of silver, high-temperature manufacturing process and corrosion of silver grid fingers. These barriers will be overcome by using new copper nanowire pastes that are sinterable and oxidation-resistant at room temperature for manufacturing highly conductive electrodes on solar panels.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.