Interface shape, heat transfer and fluid flow in the floating zone growth of large silicon crystals with the needle-eye technique

Abstract

A computer simulation is carried out to study the interface shape, heat transfer and fluid flow in the floating zone (FZ) growth of large (> 100 mm) Si crystals with the needle-eye technique and with feed/crystal rotation. Natural convection, thermocapillary convection, electromagnetic (EM) forces and rotation in the melt are considered. The unknown shape of the molten zone is calculated as a coupled thermal-electromagnetic-hydrodynamic problem and compared with that observed during experiments. The effects of the growth rate and the process stage on the shape of the interface are demonstrated. It was observed that natural convection and rotation dominate over thermocapillary and EM convection, at least for conditions corresponding to the industrial FZ Si production with the needle-eye technique. It is shown that under these conditions the rotation destabilizes the flow and only unsteady flows exist in the molten zone. The calculated distributions of the oscillation amplitude of the tangential velocity at the growing interface correspond to the radial resistivity distributions measured in the single crystal by the photo-scanning method.