Study of the brittle fracture of monocrystalline silicon wafers

There is a growing trend towards using thinner wafers in order to reduce the costs of solar energy. But the current tools employed during the solar cells production are not prepared to work with thinner wafers, decreasing the industrial yield due to the high number of wafers broken. To develop new tools, or modify existing ones, the mechanical properties have to be determined. This paper tackles an experimental study of the mechanical properties of wafers. First, the material characteristics are detailed and the process to obtain wafers is presented. Then, the complete test setup and the mechanical strength results interpreted by a described numerical model are shown.