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

太阳能是清洁、丰富和可再生的，但面临着挑战，主要是因为光伏组件的制造和安装成本较高。寻找新的太阳能转换制造技术，能够提高效率和降低制造成本，是以可再生方式满足世界未来能源需求的主要挑战。该项目旨在开展可扩展的自下而上纳米制造平台的研究，该平台能够在各种与光伏相关的衬底上实现工业规模的自清洁、宽带减反射涂层的生产，例如单晶硅和多晶硅、玻璃、砷化镓和GaSb。该平台结合了自下而上胶体自组装的简单性和成本效益，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成本更低、效率更高的晶硅太阳能电池。拟议的活动如果成功，可能会降低晶体硅太阳能电池的制造成本，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，减少石油、天然气和化石燃料发电的消耗。这项拟议的研究也可能带来对亚波长-光栅衍射的基本理解的改善。除了可再生能源，可扩展的自下而上纳米制造平台还有可能推动许多其他领域的发展，这些领域依赖于大面积周期性纳米结构的创造，从全光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.