Nano-Indentation for Measurement on Mechanical Property of Building Integrated Amorphous Silicon Thin-Film PV Cell

Abstract

Amorphous silicon thin-film PV cell(AST) generally consists of a few – micron thick silicon film on a glass substrate, which has difficulty for being accurately measured by using a conventional testing method to obtain its elastic modulus and hardness. In our study, we are applying nanoindentation for the measurement purpose and divide the sample into five regions for studying. Both of peak load - and loading rate - dependences supervise us to more accurately measure the mechanical properties of silicon layer through defining the peak load at 9000μN and loading rate at 1000μN/s. It was also observed that across the whole sample measurements on the elastic modulus have much better consistence than those on the hardness. We therefore propose a method of partitioning the sample into two parts for counting the different hardness measurements.