Abstract

Solar cell manufacture on global scale is of recent origin and the industrial experi-ence as a whole is limited. Only very recently has the industry grown to the point where intermediate products, such as solar grade silicon, silicon wafers, solar cells and solar panels are commodities with global market potential. Many processes are carried out in batch and difficult to adapt for continuous production. Other processes are in a very early stage of development. This talk reviews the production process for silicon solar cells, starting with quartz and ending with wafers. We highlight challeng-es relevant to the field of process systems engineering, such as process modeling, design and control. Research work in three distinct areas is reviewed: the application of real time optimization in silicon production, the development of scale-up models for a fluidized bed poly-silicon process and a new process concept for silicon wafer pro-duction. We will show how process innovation and the application of process systems engineering tools such as design, optimization and control can reduce cost of solar cells by a factor of two or more.

Biography

B. Erik Ydstie is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemistry from NTNU in Trondheim, Norway and a PhD in Chemical Engi-neering from Imperial College in London, UK. From 1982 till 1992 he was professor of Chemical Engi-neering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. From 1999 and 2000 he was Director of R&D for Elkem ASA in Norway. His responsibilities included technical IT, corporate and business R&D port-folio development and day to day management of the research center. He initiated corporate research programs in the areas of carbothermic aluminum production and high purity silicon for solar cells. In 2005 he founded iLS Inc to commercialize nonlinear adaptive control and real time optimization sys-tems. ILS is also been working on commercialization of a new process for making silicon wafer for so-lar cells. Prof. Ydstie has held consulting agreements with PPG, Elkem and ALCOA. He served on the advisory boards of the American Chemical Society, Petroleum Research Fund (2004-2010) and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (2004-), he has held visiting positions at Imperial College, Ecole des Mines in Paris and UNSW in Australia. In 2010 became research fellow at DOE-NETL. He has au-thored over 200 articles on process control, optimization and modeling of chemical processes. His cur-rent areas of research are process control, modeling, design and scale-up. He works on supply chain management and solar cells, aluminum production processes and oil and gas field control and optimi-zation systems. He won the Kun Li award for excellence in teaching at CMU (2007, 2010,2014), the CAST division award of the AIChE (2007), the CIT Dowd Fellowship (2012) and he was the Sargent Lecturer at Imperial College in 2006.