Scholarly record

NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THE PECVD REACTOR FOR THE SOLAR CELLS AND THE GREEN ENERGY

Mikhail Lavrentiev, Alexey Snytnikov

Abstract

One of the possible ways of transition to the eco-friendly energy is widening the use of the solar cells. It requires the enhancement of their efficiency and the reduction of the cost of manufacture. One of the most common tools for producing silicon films for the solar cells is the Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD). The present paper describes a new Particle-In-Cell code for simulation of the PECVD reactor. The goal of the research is the optimization of real PECVD reactor by means of the simulation performed with the code under study. We simulate the radio frequency (RF) discharge in the mixture of silane and hydrogen. The validity of the research method being used, namely the Particle-In-Cell method with Monte Carlo collisions is confirmed by the long employment of these methods to the subject area. Another confirmation of the validity of simulation methods is comparing with analytical solution of Vlasov equation when they are available. The results of the research are the following: we were able to simulate the ion current at the grounded electrode depending on the applied electric power. Considering novelty of the research: the new feature is a portable Python code for PECVD simulation. While the numerical method being used is quite traditional and well-known, its implementation with Python numerical libraries and GPU-oriented libraries is new as well as the high portability of the resulting code. The code is executed with no changes on GPUs, CPUs like Intel Xeon and IBM Power and computational accelerators like Intel Xeon Phi.

Publication details

Back to publication list