Sand Dune Characterization for Preparing Metallurgical Grade Silicon

Upgraded metallurgical-grade silicon solar cells with efficiency above 20%

Additivity, Metallurgical Recovery, and Grade

Proper estimation of the metallurgical recovery is very important for the assessment of the economical value of a mining business. As this quantity is nonadditive, it is not possible to model its spatial variability or to perform its estimation directly. In the present work, we first recall that additivity can concern the intrinsic nature of point-support quantities, and not only the usual supp...

Characterization of microsatellite markers for the endemic sand dune lizard, Sceloporus arenicolus

Here we characterize and report on the genetic variability of eight microsatellite loci for the endemic sand dune lizard, Sceloporus arenicolus, that amplified consistently for individuals throughout the species’ range. The number of alleles per locus was high (mean = 13.25) and observed heterozygosities ranged from 0.354 to 0.808. With the exception of a single locus, the loci did not deviate ...

Engineering Impurity Behavior on the Micron-Scale in Metallurgical-Grade Silicon Production

Impurities are detrimental to silicon-based solar cells. A deeper understanding of their evolution, microscopic distributions, and oxidation states throughout the refining processes may enable the discovery of novel refining techniques. Using synchrotron-based microprobe techniques and bulk chemical analyses, we investigate Fe, Ti, and Ca starting from siliconand carbon bearing raw feedstock ma...

Formation of silicon nanowire packed films from metallurgical-grade silicon powder using a two-step metal-assisted chemical etching method

In this work, we use a two-step metal-assisted chemical etching method to produce films of silicon nanowires shaped in micrograins from metallurgical-grade polycrystalline silicon powder. The first step is an electroless plating process where the powder was dipped for few minutes in an aqueous solution of silver nitrite and hydrofluoric acid to permit Ag plating of the Si micrograins. During th...