Simultaneous Silicon Melting and Mono Ingot Solidification (SiMMIS)

During the establishment and tremendous growth of the solar cell industry in the last decade, Norwegian industry has, due to a strong competence base within materials technology, taken and maintained a position as a world leading supplier of silicon ingot s and wafers. Since the financial crisis, this position has been seriously threatened by competitors in low-cost countries (mainly China), which has led companies like NorSun to increasingly focus on differentiation through innovative step-change technol ogy and consistent high-performance quality products. The overall goal of the project is to develop new technology for continuous Czochralski crystal pulling. Crystal growth with a continuous process has been the dream of every crystal growing engineer for several decades, but has never been industrialised in large scale, which means that it is a really difficult task with a high risk involved. If the project is successful, the new process will constitute a major step change with respect to cost and qual ity compared with today's solutions and will form the basis for monocrystalline silicon supply for the next generation of high efficiency solar cells. In the project, NorSun partner up with a Norwegian engineering company famous for its innovative soluti ons and the leading edge research institutes SINTEF (solidification modeling and experiments) and ECN (the Netherlands) (high efficiency solar cell processing). In the project, a completely new concept for a continuous process has been developed, designed, manufactured and tested. Each element of the new process has demonstrated separately. The integration and industrialization will be completed in a follow-up project provided that financing can be achieved.

During the establishment and tremendous growth of the solar cell industry in the last decade, Norwegian industry has, due to a strong competence base within materials technology, taken and maintained a position as a world leading supplier of silicon ingot s and wafers. Since the financial crisis, this position has been seriously threatened by competitors in low-cost countries (mainly China), which has led companies like NorSun to increasingly focus on differentiation through innovative step-change technolo gy and consistent high-performance quality products. The overall goals of the proposed project are (i) to develop new technology for continuous Czochralski crystal pulling (CCZ) and (ii) to demonstrate by pilot-scale production that this technology can in crease monocrystalline silicon productivity with 100 % and reduce the production cost by 50 % compared with the state-of-the-art Czochralski process performance in NorSun today. CCZ has been the dream of every crystal growing engineer for several decades, but has never been industrialised, which means that it is a really difficult task with a high risk involved. If the project is successful, the new process will constitute a major step change with respect to cost and quality compared with today's solution s and will form the basis for monocrystalline silicon supply for the next generation of high efficiency solar cells. In the project, NorSun partner up with a world leading polysilicon supplier, a Norwegian engineering company famous for its innovative sol utions, and the leading edge research institutes SINTEF (solidification modeling and experiments) and ECN (the Netherlands) (high efficiency solar cell processing).