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The fun part is seeing those ranges for silicon after having spent the last several weeks researching ways to decrease the energy costs of producing “solar grad
by amirhirsch 7y ago
The fun part is seeing those ranges for silicon after having spent the last several weeks researching ways to decrease the energy costs of producing “solar grade” (one nine less than monocrystalline wafer) silicon from silica. There’s a paper showing 1.6kg of 6-nines silicon from rice hull ash in 6hours in a 50kw arc reactor (300kwh) (https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/gc/c5gc00622h#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/gc/c5gc0...)
- rosser 7y ago> Furthermore, burning rice hulls to produce electricity and RHA, generates more energy than required for the overall process. I don't have access to the paper, but assuming I'm reading that correctly, the notion of burning rice hulls to power the process and thereby source their ash is a fantastic efficiency.
- londons_explore 7y agoThat lies between "silicon" and "electronic grade silicon" in the posted table, as you'd expect. Rice hulls cost something to produce too, and I bet you need a lot more than a kilo of them to make a kilo of silicon...