Upgrading Metallurgical Grade Silicon to Solar Grade Silicon

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

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...

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...

Performance Analysis of a Grid-Connected Upgraded Metallurgical Grade Silicon Photovoltaic System

Because of their low cost, photovoltaic (PV) cells made from upgraded metallurgical grade silicon (UMG-Si) are a promising alternative to conventional solar grade silicon-based PV cells. This study investigates the outdoor performance of a 1.26 kW grid-connected UMG-Si PV system over five years, reporting the energy yields and performance ratio and estimating the long-term performance degradati...

Effect of Silicon Nanowire on Crystalline Silicon Solar Cell Characteristics

Nanowires (NWs) are recently used in several sensor or actuator devices to improve their ordered characteristics. Silicon nanowire (Si NW) is one of the most attractive one-dimensional nanostructures semiconductors because of its unique electrical and optical properties. In this paper, silicon nanowire (Si NW), is synthesized and characterized for application in photovoltaic device. Si NWs are ...