Microstructural Evolution of Mechanically Deformed Polycrystalline Silicon for Kerfless Photovoltaics

Kerfless Wafering: Porous Silicon Reorganization and Epitaxial Silicon Growth

Controlled Nucleation and Growth Process for Large Grained Polycrystalline Silicon Photovoltaics

Research has been conducted to develop a new means of producing large grained polycrystlline thin films for photovoltaic applications. The process is one of growth of controlled crystalline nuclei in an a-Si film. For this process to be practicle, we must develop a-Si films with crystallization behavior such that the rate of spontaneous crystallization (nucleation rate) is essentially zero at t...

Bounding box algorithm for three-dimensional phase-field simulations of microstructural evolution in polycrystalline materials.

Phase-field modeling has proven to be a versatile tool for simulating microstructural evolution phenomena, such as grain growth in polycrystalline materials. However, the computing time and computing memory requirements of a phase-field model pose severe limitations on the number of phase-field variables that can be taken into account in a practical implementation. In this paper, a sparse bound...

Nucleation and Solidification of Silicon for Photovoltaics

The majority of solar cells produced today are made with crystalline silicon wafers, which are typically manufactured by growing a large piece of silicon and then sawing it into ~200 pm wafers, a process which converts one-half of the high-purity silicon into waste sawdust. To bypass the sawing process, a new method for making high-quality multicrystalline wafers without sawing is under develop...

Thin Flexible Crystalline Silicon for Photovoltaics

Preliminary results of a Silicon-On-Insulator to polymer transfer technique capable of producing large area flexible crystalline silicon layer of thicknesses between 0.4 and 2.0 μm, are presented. Formation of a shallow pn junction using ion implantation of Phosphorus was confirmed through capacitance-voltage measurements with further analysis of these results revealing a sharp junction definit...