Manufacturing Method Promises Cheaper Silicon Solar

Technology Review
March 15, 2012

Amped up: Startup Ampulse thinks its technology could trim the cost of electricity from crystalline-silicon solar panels to less than 50 cents a watt.
Credit: Dennis Schroeder

The cost of solar panels has fallen dramatically in recent years, but it'll need to drop further still if solar power is to compete with electricity from coal or natural gas. The industry needs to find something cheaper than conventional crystalline silicon, which is found in the vast majority of today's solar cells.

Ampulse, a startup in Golden, Colorado, believes it has the answer. The company says that by combining the high solar-conversion efficiency of crystalline silicon with low-cost, thin-film fabrication, it can slash the cost of producing electricity from crystalline-silicon solar panels to less than 50 cents per watt.

Conventional crystalline-silicon solar fabrication is time consuming, energy intensive, and highly inefficient. Silicon-rich gas is heated to 1,400 °C to make large crystals or ingots that are then cut into thin wafers in a process that takes several days and turns roughly half of the raw silicon material into unusable sawdust.

Ampulse uses a vapor deposition process developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, also in Golden, Colorado, to grow silicon crystals on a flexible metal foil.

The process is known as hot-wire chemical vapor deposition. A tungsten filament similar to the wire found in an incandescent lightbulb is used to heat silicon gas inside a vacuum chamber to 700 °C, causing the gas to decompose and deposit a thin film of silicon directly onto a substrate material in seconds. The resulting silicon layer is five to 10 microns thick, just enough to convert most of the solar energy that hits a panel into electricity. Conventional crystalline-silicon wafers, by comparison, are about 200 microns thick.

Ampulse combines vapor deposition with a novel substrate developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The substrate causes the silicon crystals to grow with uniform alignment and orientation, a key requirement for maintaining high cell efficiency.
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