New tool for analyzing solar-cell materials
As the United States seeks to reinvigorate its job market and move past economic recession, MIT News examines manufacturing’s role in the country's economic future through this series on work at the Institute around manufacturing.To make a silicon solar cell, you start with a slice of highly purified silicon crystal, and then process it through several stages involving gradual heating and cooling. But figuring out the tradeoffs involved in selecting the purity level of the starting silicon wafer — and then exactly how much to heat it, how fast, for how long, and so on through each of several steps — has largely been a matter of trial and error, guided by intuition and experience.Now, MIT researchers think they have found a better way.An online tool called “Impurities to Efficiency” (known as I2E) allows companies or researchers exploring alternative manufacturing strategies to plug in descriptions of their planned materials and...