|
contents | news | |||||||||
| BP Solar supports research into ribbon silicon The Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, FCUL, and BP Solar have announced a Research Agreement with the aim to develop a new technology with the potential to reduce the cost of solar cells. A significant obstacle to the expansion and wide scale production of solar electricity remains the high cost of solar cells, more than half of this cost is associated with the price of silicon wafers, high purity silicon crystals. Traditionally, the thin, 0.2mm, silicon wafers that are used to manufacture silicon solar cells are produced by slicing large high purity silicon ingots. This process wastes more than half of the original material since the wire that is used to saw the ingot into wafers has a thickness similar to that of the finished wafers. In order to avoid material wastage and to reduce costs, an alternative is to seek new methods for the growth of silicon crystals directly in the form of a ribbon. Though a simple idea and first proposed over 40 years ago, the production of good quality silicon ribbon at low cost has proved an extremely difficult problem. The Group of Semiconductors and PV Applications of FCUL has dedicated much of the last decade researching alternative techniques for the growth of ribbon silicon. This research lead recently to very interesting results with a new technique, which has been filed for an international patent. This new technique, called EZ-Ribbon, is based on a physical process with potential for a significant reduction of the cost of the solar cells. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Construction News :: home page |