SBIR Phase I: Refinement of the Floating Silicon Method to Produce Drop-In Silicon Wafers for High Efficiency Solar Cells

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a 25% cost reduction in solar panel manufacturing and the elimination of up to 2.1 Gigatons of annual CO2 generation. As silicon wafers are the most expensive component in the $50BN solar panel industry, our low-cost wafer manufacturing technology presents the strongest opportunity to reduce global solar panel production costs. This cost reduction drives the compelling economics needed for increasing solar market penetration. As context, the solar market has historically doubled for every 20% cost reduction created by the industry. Our single crystal wafers are further significantly higher quality, and therefore can enable up to 10% higher effective efficiency using existing commercial solar panel manufacturing lines. Further, as the incumbent silicon wafer production process is extremely energy- and material-intensive and thus constitutes 80% of the solar industry?s carbon footprint, our direct and high efficiency technology has the potential to reduce the solar industry's 2026 carbon footprint by over 50%. The proposed project develops the systems needed for our process to produce silicon wafers with commercial dimensions and demonstrates to solar manufacturers (our customers) that our wafers can be processed by commercial solar cell lines. As our process produces a continuous ribbon of silicon, this work will develop a cutting system that laser cuts discrete wafers with the edges and dimensions needed for commercial solar cell processing. This involves developing the laser cutting recipes, the wafer handling systems, and verifying with a third party that the edge quality does not interfere with cell processing. Our project then investigates and optimizes our wafers' performance during each critical step of commercial solar cell processing, including chemical etching and screen printing. A successful demonstration that our low-cost wafer can 'drop-in' to an existing cell line to deliver equivalent (or better) performance compared to the incumbent technology would gate our working with industry partners to commercialize this process. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.