Crystal evaluation of spherical silicon produced by dropping method and their solar cell performance

44.4L: Late‐News Paper: Large Area Display Backplane Using Embedded Single‐Crystal Silicon Particles

“…These spheres have higher material quality than either amorphous-, nano-, or poly-crystalline Si [3,4]. The challenges associated with making such large crystal spheres are largely due to the internal stresses developed when cooling.…”

Evaluation of photovoltaic power generation system using spherical silicon solar cells and SiC-FET inverter

“…Spherical Si solar cells are a new type solar cell, and are composed of Si spheres with a diameter of ~1 mm with a pn junction [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14], which can reduce the consumption of Si compared with crystalline Si solar cells. In our previous work, spherical Si solar cell systems combined with a direct current-alternating current (DC-AC) inverter using SiC field-effect transistor (FET) were constructed [15].…”

Solidification behavior of falling germanium droplets produced by pulsated orifice ejection method

“…Several groups have recently tried to prepare silicon and germanium particles using their original methods involving a drop-tube technique [4][5][6][7]. The drop-tube technique is surely suitable for mass production of particles comparing to others such as the levitation methods.…”

“…However, the drop-tube technique has not satisfied all the requirements, particularly the microstructural control for reduction in grain density. Omae et al [4] demonstrated that in the particles applicable for the spherical solar cells should consist of a few grains. At an early stage, Li and Herlach [6] obtained the germanium particles by the drop-tube technique as well as the levitation method, and roughly estimated the solidification undercooling levels corresponding to several kinds of microstructures in the droplet particles.…”