I-Corps: Development of a Scalable Bottom-Up Nanofabrication Platform

太阳能是清洁、丰富和可再生的，但主要由于光伏组件的制造和安装成本高而面临挑战。寻找可以提高效率和降低制造成本的太阳能转换新制造技术是以可再生方式满足世界未来能源需求的主要挑战。该项目旨在对一个可扩展的自下而上的纳米纤维平台进行研究，该平台能够在各种各样的光化学相关衬底上工业规模生产自清洁，宽带涂层，如单晶硅和多晶硅，玻璃，GaAs和GaSb。该平台结合了自下而上胶体自组装的简单性和成本优势以及自上而下微制造的可扩展性和兼容性。拟议的活动旨在实现更便宜和更有效的晶体硅太阳能电池。拟议的活动如果成功，可能会导致降低晶体硅太阳能电池的制造成本和提高转换效率。提高太阳能电池的转换效率有助于减少对环境的影响以及石油、天然气和化石燃料产生的电力的消耗。改进的亚波长光栅衍射的基本理解，也可能会导致拟议的研究。除了可再生能源，可扩展的自下而上的纳米结构平台有可能推动许多其他依赖于大面积周期性纳米结构的领域，从全光学集成电路到高效发光二极管。

Solar energy is clean, abundant, and renewable, but faces challenges mainly due to the high manufacturing and installation costs of photovoltaic modules. Finding novel fabrication techniques for solar energy conversion that could increase efficiency and lower manufacturing cost is a primary challenge in meeting the world's future energy needs in a renewable fashion. This project aims to conduct research on a scalable bottom-up nanofabrication platform that enables industrial-scale production of self-cleaning, broadband antireflection coatings on a large variety of photovoltaics-relevant substrates, such as single-crystalline and multicrystalline silicon, glass, GaAs, and GaSb. This platform combines the simplicity and cost benefits of bottom-up colloidal self-assembly with the scalability and compatibility of top-down microfabrication. The proposed activity is aimed at enabling less expensive and more efficient crystalline silicon solar cells. The proposed activity, if successful, may lead to reduced manufacturing cost and increased conversion efficiency of crystalline silicon solar cells. Improving the conversion efficiency of solar cells facilitates to reduce the environmental impact and the consumption of oil, natural gas, and fossil fuels-generated electricity. Improved fundamental understanding of subwavelength-grating diffraction may also result from the proposed research. Besides renewable energy, the scalable bottom-up nanofabrication platform has the potential to advance many other areas that depend on the creation of large-area periodic nanostructures, ranging from all-optical integrated circuits to high-efficiency light emitting diodes.