UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Palathra, Thomas CherianSubject: search.filters.subject.Photovoltaics

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    Process Modeling of a Wire Saw Operation
    (2008-08-29) Palathra, Thomas Cherian; Adomaitis, Raymond A; Chemical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Multicrystalline (MC) silicon solar cells are manufactured from bread-loaf sized ingots of solar-grade silicon by means of a multi-wire saw. In a typical wire saw system, MC ingots are sliced with an area of 100x100 mm2 and the latest wire saw systems can achieve thicknesses down to 300 microns. What makes this a challenging simulation problem is the wide range of timescales that characterize the overall cutting process. The slowest dynamics are associated with the evolution of the cut, which is described by a spatially dependent differential equation in time and in which the cutting rate is modeled much in the same manner as the Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP) process. The goal is to understand the physical mechanisms that limit how thin the wafers can be cut and to determine the sensitivity of cutting time and cutting rate based on process parameters.