Effect of pellet size and additive on silica carbothermic reduction in microwave furnace for solar grade silicon

Abstract

Silicon as a raw material for solar cells can be produced by numerous methods. The carbothermic reduction of silica using electric arc furnace is the most widely used process in silicon industry. This paper presents a new approach to produce solar grade silicon using microwave furnace. Pellets of different sizes were prepared from a mixture of silica and carbon using water and polyvinyl alcohol as binder agents. Raman spectra indicated a peak at about 515 cm −1 attributed to silicon in the pellets prepared with polyvinyl alcohol, and peaks at about 523 cm −1 and 794 cm −1 attributed to silicon and silicon carbide, in the pellets prepared with water. The pellet size affects the absorption of microwave energy emitted from the magnetrons. Polyvinyl alcohol as a binder agent is promising for the production of silicon using microwave furnace.

Low‐Temperature Synthesis of Amorphous Silicon and Its Ball‐in‐Ball Hollow Nanospheres as High‐Performance Anodes for Sodium‐Ion Batteries

“…Carbothermic reduction is a common industrial procedure to manufacture solar energy c‐Si from quartz sand (natural mineral) in an electric arc furnace described in Equation (). [ 13 ] Since Nature published the first report in 2007 on using magnesiothermic reduction to prepare c‐Si from diatom frustules (marine plant) according to Equation (), [ 14 ] the method has been extensively applied in the field of LIBs. [ 4,5,15 ] Therefore, it will be of great significance to develop a low‐temperature facile approach to produce carefully crafted a‐Si structures from silica for SIBs.…”

Porous Amorphous Silicon Hollow Nanoboxes Coated with Reduced Graphene Oxide as Stable Anodes for Sodium-Ion Batteries

“…In contrast, silica is a cheap and readily available source of Si, and carbothermic reduction and magnesiothermic reduction are two common methods of producing Si from silica. The former uses carbothermic reduction 19 of quartz sand at a high temperature (1900 °C) to produce solar energy Si and the latter originates from magnesiothermic reduction 20 of diatom frustules at a lower temperature (650 °C), but both of these methods yield c-Si. Thus, it can be seen that the production of a-Si from silica is a meaningful task.…”

Upgraded metallurgical grade silicon and polysilicon for solar electricity production: A comparative life cycle assessment

“…All of the have in common their lower energy consumption (Forniés et al, 2016;Maldonado, 2020), and therefore low energy and carbon footprints. Even though the penetration in the market of alternative feedstocks of has not yet become significant, these still raise the attention of the research community (Chen et al, 2019;Cherif et al, 2019;Du and Liu, 2020;Ye et al, 2019) and the industry (Osborne, 2020;Verdu, 2020).…”