Particularities of the thermal and oxygen concentration instabilities in a Czochralski process for solar silicon growth

Abstract

A previous presented numerical model was used to study the time behavior particularities of temperature and oxygen concentration in a Czochralski (Cz) growth process of 200 mm diameter silicon single crystals for photovoltaic applications. First, some important model issues have been addressed: the dependence of the numerical results on the refinement level of the grid and on the model for oxygen equilibrium concentration at the melt-crucible interface. Then a parametrical study have been performed to study how the pulling rate and the rotation rate of the crucible influence the fluctuations of temperature and oxygen concentration near the crystallization interface. The numerical simulations have revealed that the temperature oscillations are closer to a normal distribution than the oxygen concentration, which is closer to a skewed left distribution.Both the increase of crucible rotation rate and pull speed has an effect of “pushing to the left”: the histogram of temperature fluctuations tends from a skewed right distribution to a normal distribution with the increase of the pull speed and crucible rotation values while the oxygen concentration is more skewed to the left. As a general conclusion, the numerical simulations have shown that the oxygen concentration is more sensitive to the crucible rotation than the temperature field, while the pull speed has a stronger effect on temperature oscillations than on the oxygen concentration oscillations.