Novel Production Technology for Silicon Products

Silicon, the second-most abundant element in the earth's crust, is crucial for our technology-driven society. Silicon gives us computers, smartphones, solar cells, and light-emitting devices. The element is a component in an inexhaustible list of advanced materials that we depend on in our daily lives. Electronics and solar cells need extremely high purity silicon. Now, emerging technologies are exploring new uses of silicon, such as using nanoparticles in high capacity lithium-ion batteries. IFE has for more than ten years been developing technology to produce high-quality silicon products from silane gas. Silane is a high-purity gas that contains only silicon and hydrogen, and using methods available at IFE we can remove the hydrogen and we are remaining with silicon of very high purity. The equipment at IFE is capable of making silicon with specific properties, which can be suitable for different applications. In this project IFE is partnering with a Danish company that is developing a new process for production of silane gas. We expect that the combination of the new silane production method and new production method for silicon products will open up market opportunities, especially for small-scale production facilities. This is unique - most of the high-purity silicon in the world is produced by large chemical companies, and there are very few of producers of silane gas. IFE will in this project focus on production of silicon nanoparticles and testing of tailored particles in Li-ion batteries. We will vary both the morphology and composition of the particles, and adapt the processing reactors to operate for the optimized product both with regards to battery performance and the silane product that the partner company can provide.

The overall goal of this project is to validate, that by combination of a novel method for silane gas manufacturing with different forms of silicon production by thermal decomposition, will provide the necessary quality and at the same time prove competitive and cost-efficient for one or several markets for high-quality silicon products. In addition, a preliminary set of design criteria and engineering solutions required to establish a fully integrated turn-key production unit for the manufacturing of high-quality silicon feedstock will be developed.