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Optical Furnace Bakes Better Solar Cells
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory just announced that they have found a way to create more efficient photovoltaic cells using 50% less energy. The technique hinges upon a new optical furnace that uses intense light instead of a conventional furnace to heat silicon to make solar cells. The new furnace utilizes 'highly reflective and heat-resistant ceramics to ensure that the light is absorbed only by a silicon wafer, not by the walls inside the furnace.'"
Until I read a Slashdot article about a facility in the PRC manufacturing photovoltaic cells using 'highly reflective and heat-resistant ceramics to ensure that the light is absorbed only by a silicon wafer, not by the walls inside the furnace'"?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
The idea of removing impurities using light is cool if it increases the efficiency of the completed pannel.
The premise of saving energy in the manufacture of the panels isn't really relevant. Currently producing silicon uses lots of energy, but it needen't really. The process really only involves heating and cooling of relatively small volumes of silicon, and if you were to design a machine to do it continuously, you could do it with nearly no energy. The raw materials are cold, the output is cold, and the processing in the middle is hot - use the energy from the finished product cooling down to heat new raw materials in a continuous process, as already done in a water Heat Exchanger.
The reason this currently isn't done is because energy is a tiny cost in the production of silicon, and other things are far more important than recapturing a tiny amount of energy while the silicon cools down.
not another we'll-never-see-it solar breakthrough. I suppose highly-efficient batteries, flying cars, and fusion power will be the next stories.
I worked on an optical/ceramic-walled metallization furnace that started shipping a year ago. Apparently our US marketing people didn't come up with sufficiently catchy buzz to generate sales. I was laid off in September after documenting all the assembly procedures for our new plant in ... Shanghai :-(
Unfortunately the article is dumbed down a lot, so it is not easy to understand what technology is actually supposed to be used. But this sound a lot like a Rapid Thermal Anneal (RTA/RTP), which has been used for decades in semiconductor manufacturing. It has also been used a lot in lab environment to manufacture solar cells. It is possible that the energy consumption can be reduced, but the tool throughput and maintenance costs are quite a bit higher than that of a conventional furnace. I suppose that is why it did not catch on so far.
Are there any manufacturers of solar panels that uses solar power (ie from their own panels) for the manufacturing process?
"Optimal furnace bakes solar cells better" sounded more impressive.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Why not just use solar energy directly to do this and cut out the middleman of solar panels or other energy sources?
Even a remotely cloudy area can focus enough energy to smelt high-temp metals.
Solar Smelters, furnaces and cookers are used all around the world.
If you are in a sunny area, there is no reason not to have one since you can usually use them 85%+ of the time. (which takes in to consideration very bad years where weather has been abysmal for sunlight)
Industrial scale solar smelters would work wonders for saving power and make your production at least less "damaging".
Same could probably be done over water, shining sunlight on to an ultra dark container to heat water and lead steam to condense on a downward pipe over some dynamos. Will be costly, but doable and is probably actually less costly than huge ass dams on the very limited areas they can be placed, even though these will have to probably use large amounts of mirrors. (mind you, even a large backyard satellite can melt metals with very basic broken-mirror method of reflection, that isn't even fully optimized and works)
Go, do it, someone do it. Clean energy and even clean water if handled right.
Ouch!, on your behalf....on a larger scale, America seems to be in the grip of this attitude of "If it won't make us a lot of money today, we don't want to play!" at the Wall Street/venture capital/NHWI level.
To our detriment; Rome wasn't built in a day - but it took about a day to fall.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Bullocks. Rome took centuries to fall.
I hardly see how Saundra Bullock caused the fall of Rome.
The true expense of Li-ion batteries is that they are heated to something like 900C. Hellish to say the least. Is there a way to lower that cost? That would drop the costs of li-ion batteries a great deal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is funny how that works. Here in America, we have become our worst enemies. Our retailers, esp. the big boxes, buy from guys that have factories back in China. And local retailers will not carry local stuff, even though they get loads of requests. So, they carry things like EXPENSIVE EU and japanese goods, or cheap chinese one.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
lolll...no, the Roman Empire - its power structure, and so its government - took about three decades to decay to the point that Alaric could sack Rome on August 24, A.D. 410.
About as long as "flood-up/trickle-down" economics has been dictating policy in the U.S., in fact.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
There prob. were some steps involving fossilization of
the solar-grown material in between though.
bjd
Count down till an alleged hack that originated from China. But an official statement of loss of data will be published about a year from now. Later,
Thinking that is by intent: What better way for a big box retailer to ensure that their labor is cheap, than to destroy higher-paying manufacturing jobs that would - without question - successfully compete for their workers?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
but we are determined to do it faster stronger better
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Of course, those big boxes are easy to destroy in china since the Chinese gov. LIMITS them. As such, the *marts are destroying their own set of customers. With this regard, the rest of the west is MUCH MUCH smarter than is America today.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well the decay in the united states started in the 1980's so I'm guess we are right on track.
it was about that time when Corporations stopped caring about product quality and innovation and decided that the right thing is to maximize profits at all costs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Virtually all caravan and recreational vehicle/motor home devices are 12v.
The problem is the amperage with a 12v supply.
Deleted
Actually, the company had some customers that would only accept US-made product, after being burned by the quality coming out of our Chinese plant. In other cases Chinese product was shipped to the US plant for rework before going to the end user. I don't intend to generalize, but I spent close to two months working with our Chinese manufacturing engineers and found a real lack of analytical thinking and common-sense problem solving, along with a great reluctance to make vendors solve their quality issues.
The problem has been a predictable result of Corporations railing against restriction and regulation. We put powerful rods in the reactor of capitalism when at the turn of the twentieth century a succession of economic disasters was precipitated by wholesale greed and financial practices that made a tiny few rich, but impoverished the masses.
We find ourselves learning the hard way, that we haven't changed in any significant way in 100 years, that greed is ultimately destructive and that our economic engines need exactly the same kind of checks and balances that our political engines require, because in the end, its all about the best and worst in being human. If you don't ensure stability, diversity and fair competition, you get boom-bust, profound disparity and a system which us ultimately unsustainable.
Corporations must be separated from government, for the benefit of both. Both must have a strong set of checks and balances (for example, corporations must not have the rights of human beings.) Both must have strong external guidance based on the greater good of society including environmental necessity, social responsibility and human dignity. A system of rewards and punishment must be implemented that moves these great forces in a direction that serves the needs of humanity and not the other way around.
But its not like the conditions of Rome in 380 AD were the conditions of Rome for all the years prior. It took a lot going wrong to get there.
IMHO the "decline" really starts with the death of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius, depending on your perspective. Some people even think it starts earlier, with the end of the Republic and the start of the empire.
With this breakthrough, it will now be possible to create high performance solar furnaces for the production of solar cells. literally taking petrochemicals out of the equation and using sunlight to capture sunlight for power. This is a groundbreaking shift towards a solar economy. The implications are revolutionary.
To date, the true cost of solar collection had to include the high cost in petroleum products to create the cells in the first place. This marks a new age of solar manufacture and will be most essential when humanity begins building on the Moon and Mars. The energy source in abundance in these new places will be solar. To the degree we perfect the production of solar energy over the next 20 years, we will have a profound foothold on other worlds in the inner solar system.
It is true that it took the powerful and wealthy of Rome more than a day to destroy any real loyalty to their government - but again, you're referencing the Roman Empire. The fall of Rome itself came with unseemly speed when Rome's economic underclass opened the Salarian Gate for the Visigoths.
Hence my comment that "Rome wasn't built in a day - but it took about a day to fall.". The moral of the story, of course, is that you allow greed to weaken your nation and disillusion your populace at your own peril, for when the big day comes the safest place in the empire won't be safe enough.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Bullocks. Rome took centuries to fall.
It took millennia (billenia?) to fall, if you count the time involved gathering matter together, exploding it to make heavier elements (twice), then gathering it together again and having two planets collide to form our moon, the basis of life on this planet. So, you're also off by several orders of magnitude, if you wish to be adequately pedantic. Or, you could say it fell in a microsecond, that being the last decision the ruler made to doom it.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Sorry to barge in with an on-topic post, but I'd like to direct you (all) to a post from 2011-12-06. Somebody fucking stole my idea!
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
This idea makes sense. PV cells are designed to absorb the solar spectrum that has a peak emissive power at optical wavelengths.
I worked in development for a company that was developing a furnace for firing PV cells like this. For some unknown reason they thought the best approach was to heat the silicon wafers at shorter and shorter wavelengths (using UV lamps). Turns out that the wafers are nearly transparent at wavelengths of UV and shorter, so they were literally driving themselves into a ditch. The wafers were heated, but only due to the fact that the lamps heated up all of the refractory and set up convection currents in the furnace. They were not happy when I explained to them the whole premise of their design was flawed.
Thankfully I resigned (after a mere 7 months) and moved on to greener pastures before the inevitable stock price drop and downsizing. It's funny how you may not always see how screwed up an organization is until you take a job with them.
America seems to be in the grip of this attitude of "If it won't make us a lot of money today, we don't want to play!" at the Wall Street/venture capital/NHWI level.
And it will remain so, until we start shooting people with Marketing degrees or MBAs, or the Chinese invade. Whichever comes first.
I have been thinking about a oven design for baking food with. Basically, put an inner oven of high temps (say 450F) inside of another oven(350F or so) which goes inside of another (275F), down to something for drying with. Then do some solar thermal work. My only problem with that, is that solar PV is now much cheaper than solar thermal. That changes the economics of it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Applying that metric to the US, it will collapse some time around 2018-2020.
Sounds about right, considering the last decades worth of irresponsible handling of all things economic and military.
If I had mod points, I'd give them all to you.
That's a wonderful summary of cause and effect and possible solutions.
Thank you.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Large scale solar power of any type is going to be the result of a lot of innovation over an extended period of time, and it is going to have a long and expensive road to large scale deployment. That's true for large civic engineering projects in general.
Your comment shows that you are to stupid to understand this. So since you think that this kind of post is meaningless and a waste of time, why don't you skip reading it and posting about it? You could spend your time marveling about how smart you are, and spare the rest of us having to read or reply to your drivel. You are wrong and we don't really care what you think, so STFU.
In case it's not perfectly clear at this point, this is a personal attack. You're welcome.
Why is Snark Required?
At the risk of sounding like a free market wanker, capitalist markets will find a way to subvert regulatory reform. Now that they've had practise undoing reforms put in place during the first great depression, they'll just get 'er done faster this time. We need revolution not regulation. I don't mean Tea Party style guns a-blazing revolution, just a complete rationally based restructuring of our economy. Worker owned cooperatives might be a compromise economic structure that will satisfy both Marxists and capitalists. If not that, than something else. Using your nuclear analogy, we don't need an improvement to fission plants, we need fusion, because, to paraphrase Murphy, if shit can go wrong, it will.
http://www.marxist.com/
Rome has been sacked several times. Attributing the fall of Rome to one of these events is poppycock.
So since you think that this kind of post is meaningless and a waste of time, why don't you skip reading it and posting about it? You could spend your time marveling about how smart you are, and spare the rest of us having to read or reply to your drivel. You are wrong and we don't really care what you think, so STFU.
In case it's not perfectly clear at this point, this is a personal attack. You're welcome.
I rather hate to have to explain it to you as the very need attenuates your "personal attack" into nothingness, but my point is we develop the technology and then lose the opportunity to profit from it because the greed at the top will seek the higher profit margins available through utilizing the cheaper labor of the PRC instead of seeking to ensure the safety and security - the long term survival - of the United States of America.
But to retrieve something of value to you from your "personal attack", you may nonetheless consider me to be seriously emotionally wounded by your comment.
Have a nice day.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I hasten to add that you can better - or at least personally - employ your fervor at http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu/
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Rome has been sacked several times. Attributing the fall of Rome to one of these events is poppycock.
Interesting....to rephrase your statement in more immediate terms "The house has burned down several times; attributing the house burning down to a failure to prevent the house from burning down is poppycock."
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Is it just me, or is there a solar cell "breakthrough" about every 2 months on slashdot--- you'd think that solar cells would be 1,000x better by now, with each successive claim promising 40% more this or that... and yet, here we are... Just like an AIDS vaccine, I'll believe it when I see it.