Grinding and Polishing of Nanolayered Structures: Thin Film Amorphous Silicon Solar Panels

Thin film solar cells are expected to play a key role in the next generation of photovoltaic devices, due to low costs and manufacturing advantages. Their functionality would be increased further if thin film solar panels were able to be machined efficiently without affecting the integrity of the nanoscale component layers. In this work, we investigated the effects of grinding and polishing processes on the integrity of solar panels. With the limited selection of grinding wheels and abrasive sizes, surface roughness and chipping were in the order of micrometers, while the use of diamond film polishing resulted in roughness in the order of nanometers with minimal damage to the layers.