Are these super-efficient, cheap solar panels the ones you will finally buy and stop putting off?
Rayton Solar seems to have figured out how to produce silicon solar panels without shaving off massive amounts of wasted silicon. The old methods would cut silicon down to size with a steel wire, coated in diamond, losing nearly half the silicon in the process and limiting the size of the panel to 200 microns.
The new method, utilized at Rayton Solar, is called "Ion Implantation" and involves using a particle accelerator to charge an ion beam which is directed at the rotating silicon ingot. The beam penetrates the ingot and causes it to wheel out a 10 micron thick ribon of silicon, 20x thinner than old solar panels. Additionally, no silicon is wasted.
Hydrogen atoms are run through high voltage, 300 keV (300,000 Volt) stacks, charging them. When they hit a certain energy level, the protons are able to penetrate 4 microns into the silicon. After the protons enter, a chemical reaction occurs inside the silicon and the protons turn back into hydrogen gas, cracking off a piece 4 microns thin; this proccess is known as "exfoliation." 4 microns is the minimum thickness needed to collect energy from sunlight with a monocrystaline silicon.
A driving force behind this is to bring the cost of solar panels down. Another way to visualize the size differential is that if old solar panels were the thickness of a piece of toast, these new ones would be the thickness of a sheet of paper.
Here is a video overview of the process
A brilliant interview with the maker
