Recently, I had a drink with a few friends in the HJT industry. After a few glasses, the conversation circled back to the old topic: "The efficiency is unquestionable, but the silver paste... it’s just too costly."
This is almost a thorn in the side of all players in the HJT sector. Conductive silver paste accounts for nearly one-third of the cost of a single battery cell. Without solving this problem, large-scale production is nothing but empty talk.
The industry has been experimenting with numerous solutions for years. Now, it seems that the most promising and practical approach is silver-coated copper.
Silver-Coated Copper: Sounds Simple, but Involves Intricate Know-How
To the untrained eye, it might seem like just mixing silver powder with copper powder. But doing that would be a total disaster.
Genuine silver-coated copper involves fully plating a layer of nano-silver on the surface of each micron-sized copper powder particle. You can envision it as a "copper-core chocolate" — a smooth, conductive silver layer on the outside, and a solid copper core inside that drives cost reduction.
This design directly addresses the core pain points:The outer silver layer ensures unimpeded current flow, achieving a contact resistance as low as that of pure silver paste;The inner copper core effectively cuts down the usage of precious metals, slashing costs significantly.
The challenge lies in crafting this "silver coating" to be ultra-thin, perfectly uniform and highly durable. Thinness is for saving silver; uniformity and durability ensure stable conductivity and resistance to oxidation. Even the tiniest deviation in process control can lead to a world of difference in performance.
Our Approach: Instead of "Cooking with Ready Ingredients", Start by "Growing the Vegetables"
Most paste manufacturers in the market adopt a model of "purchasing powder + formulating recipes". It’s like a chef who buys ingredients (powder) from the market and relies on their seasoning (formulation) skills.
Betely takes a different path. We believe the ingredients themselves are the decisive factor. That’s why we choose to "grow our own vegetables" — by developing conductive powder from the very stage of synthesis, all in-house.
(Betely's self-developed silver-coated copper powder/paste micro-morphology)
We independently research how to plate the silver layer more evenly, conduct surface treatment to prevent oxidation, and control the particle size and shape of the powder. This approach is certainly more demanding, but the advantages are evident: when you hold the powder in your hand, you have peace of mind.
When a customer comes to us and asks: "We’re under huge cost pressure — can we lower the silver content even further?"
For most enterprises that "purchase powder to make paste", this is not a simple recipe adjustment. They may first spend weeks scouring the globe to screen or even customize powder that meets the new requirements. During this time, the customer’s production lines are on hold, while the pressure of cost reduction mounts by the day. Once the powder finally arrives, the long process of recipe debugging and process adaptation has only just begun.
But Betely is different.
Because we "hold the powder in our hand" — we have full control over powder synthesis, plating and modification from the source. When a customer puts forward a new demand, we directly adjust the fundamental powder structure and formula simultaneously in our lab. This means we typically only need three to five days from communicating the demand to delivering a preliminary feasible sample solution.
Three days versus three weeks — this is the speed gap brought by the integration of powder and paste production. It solves not only technical problems, but also the customer’s pressure from time cost and opportunity cost.
We believe speed is not the only criterion; yet, responding faster than others while ensuring reliability is in itself a powerful competitive edge.
Cost Reduction Must Not Mean "Cutting Corners"
We have launched a series of products with different silver contents (such as SF-3000A-AC, SF-3000C-F, SF-3000C-B, SF-3000C-G10) — not to pad our product catalog.
We understand that there is no "best" paste, only the most suitable one. Some customers have high-precision production lines that can handle formulations with lower silver content; others have strict requirements for welding tensile strength, so a higher silver content is needed to ensure stability.
Our role is not to hand you a one-size-fits-all answer, but to sit down with you and develop the optimal solution tailored to your existing process conditions and cost targets.
The cost reduction campaign for HJT has entered a deep stage. Silver-coated copper is rapidly evolving from an "alternative solution" to the "mainstream choice". This is not because the concept is novel, but because it is currently the most solid balance point between performance and cost.
At Betely, we focus on doing this one thing well: leveraging our core material capabilities to help you walk this tightrope of balance steadily and successfully.
