When Were Solar Panels Invented

when i first heard about using particle acceleratorsto create solar panels, i thought… what?! i must not understand how solar panels aremade. or how particle accelerators work? and yes, there’s a key, unglamorous step that– unless you’re fairly familiar with solar manufacturing technology (which i’m not)– you probably wouldn’t think of, and it’s in this step where a particle acceleratorturns out to be useful: cutting silicon into

When Were Solar Panels Invented, the really thin wafers that are the key componentof a solar panel. however, even this wasn’t at all what ifirst thought, which was something like slicing through the crystal with a super powerfulparticle beam. that sounds awesome, but the actual technique is much less insane and muchmore clever.

ok, so a typical solar panel cell begins asa carefully grown cylinder of silicon atoms arranged in a regular crystal lattice, whichare then trimmed and cut into wafer-thin…wafers. some of which retain curved corners as hallmarksof the original cylindrical crystal. then the wafers get covered with other metals,anti-reflective coatings and electrodes, and so on, to be able to capture the sun’s energy– but the part we want to focus on is the cutting. because when you cut something witha saw, like silicon wafers normally are, there are two problems: one, you can't cut a slicetoo thin otherwise it might get broken – typical solar panel wafers are cut to about 0.15 millimeters.and two, unlike a knife which cuts by separating and wedging two pieces of material apart,a saw cuts with teeth that gouge and eat away

at the material, turning it into saw-dustand leaving a gap called a kerf. in the case of silicon wafers, the gap is roughly thesame width as the wafers themselves, which means about half of the original materialgoes to waste! this is where particle accelerators come in:â notas a high powered ablative cutting particle beam, but by taking advantage of the physicsof crystals. if instead you shoot protons with a certain energy at the flat face ofthe silicon cylinder, those protons will embed themselves into the silicon. the depth dependson how much energy they have, and the thinner you want, the less energy they take, so youcan easily pick something super thin. but whatever thickness you choose, once insidethe silicon crystal lattice, the protons kind

of push it apart and create stress; if youheat the whole thing up, a wafer will break right off, cleanly cleaving along the crystallattice lines where the protons were. so, if after the protons are embedded, but beforethe heating, you glue this proto-wafer onto a piece of glass or plastic, and then heatit up, you end up with a nice thin wafer of silicon attached to a durable (and possiblyflexible) material, with no waste silicon whatsoever. to me, this is clever physicsengineering! of course, a particle accelerator is muchmore expensive than a saw, so there must be some upsides to it – the biggest is that,by using significantly less silicon per wafer and not losing any silicon in the cuttingprocess, it’s possible to justify using

much more expensive silicon that’s betterat capturing sunlight, meaning the resultant solar panels for a given power output aresmaller and need less other material to make them and hold them up, hence they’re cheaper.hopefully enough cheaper to make up for the extra costs of using a particle acceleratorto part silicon! the company that’s trying to use the particle-acceleratortechnology i talked about in this video to make solar cells on a commercial scale, thiscompany is called rayton solar. this is a challenging and expensive endeavor and they’relooking for investors, so they sponsored this video to get the word out - startengine.com/startup/rayton-solar.i’m not going to make any endorsement – i mean, i’m neither an investment expert,nor a solar industry expert – but i do believe

strongly that we need both political and technologicalsolutions to secure our planet’s energy future, so i’m happy to help rayton reacha broader audience to help give them a chance for this clever idea to succeed, and i’mmaking a small investment myself. hopefully they’ll end up being one of the many manypieces that come together to provide a civilized long-term future for humanity on earth.

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