When Seth Shumate (’02) first saw the results of his simulation for a new approach to a silicon solar cell in February of this year, he thought something was wrong. What he saw must have been a mistake.
So he did what any good scientist does — he ran another simulation.
“I thought the system was malfunctioning so I took it to another machine, which does a more detailed sort of test, and it was real there, too,” Shumate said with a smile growing across his face. “Then we did it again — over and over and over. It was exciting to see, but I was really skeptical. I thought maybe one of the other grad students had turned up the lamp to give it too much simulated sunlight.”
He then went straight to his adviser’s office at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he is working on a doctorate in microelectronics-photonics, an interdisciplinary program in engineering. The program includes operational management classes in addition to traditional engineering classes.
Shumate showed a printout of the graph of his results to the person supervising him using the system. The supervisor asked him why he was smiling.
“I said, ‘That’s a million dollar graph.’ I’m pretty even tempered, but that was exciting,” Shumate said.
He had a reason to smile: the simulation showed Shumate had discovered a way to make an individual silicon solar cell 15 percent more effective. It is the largest single-step efficiency gain in solar cells since 1974, said Douglas Hutchings (’01), chief executive officer of Silicon Solar Solutions, the company for which Shumate serves as the chief technology officer.
But what does a 15 percent increase in efficiency really mean? Hutchings said an industrial-quality silicon solar cell that has an efficiency rating of about 20 percent, meaning that the solar cell converts about 20 percent of the solar energy it conducts into electricity, would become 23 percent efficient using Shumate’s process.
Silicon Solar Solutions operates out of a small office in the University of Arkansas’ Engineering Research Center, which is part of the College of Engineering. The building houses several engineering-related research firms and laboratories. The research center is located in the Arkansas Research and Technology Park in Fayetteville.
Hutchings, 30, developed the company while working on his doctorate on microelectronics-photonics. College of Engineering students may also earn a graduate certificate of entrepreneurship by supplementing the engineering classes with a certain number of business classes. Among those classes are a series of venture development courses taught by Dr. Carol Reeves, the associate vice provost for entrepreneurship and the Cecil and Gwendolyn Cupp Applied Professorship in Entrepreneurship in the Sam. M. Walton College of Business’ Department of Management. In one of the courses, students from various disciplines work as a team to come up with an idea for a company, develop a business plan and take it to business competitions with the goal of starting a real company. The company idea Hutchings and two masters of business administration students developed was based on developing a large-grain silicon solar cell that was more efficient and produced in a simpler process at a lower cost.
Hutchings’ team competed in about 16 competitions, placing in the top three in all of them and winning six outright, including the 2010 Global Venture Challenge sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. The project garnered about $60,000 in prize money.
The other two students moved on to other jobs upon graduation, but Hutchings decided to stick with the company. By November 2009, Hutchings was able to raise enough seed money to get the company off the ground. Since then, Silicon Solar Solutions has raised about $1.5 million in private equity, state support and research grants.
Hutchings couldn’t work for the company initially as he was finishing his doctoral work on a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship requirements prevented him from having a paying job. Instead, he turned to his longtime classmate and friend — Shumate, who was finishing his master’s degree and beginning work on his doctorate.
The company licensed the technology for a large-grain polysilicon solar cell from the university. Shumate spent the summer of 2010 modifying the laboratory assigned to the company in the research center to do the work on the leased technology.
One of the company’s initial goals was to work toward meeting the Department of Energy’s 2020 goal to reduce the total cost for production of silicon solar cells to 50 cents per watt of electricity produced. Shumate said most solar cells now cost about 60 to 65 cents per watt produced. At that selling point, companies aren’t able to operate a sustainable business, so by improving the cells’ efficiency, it would allow the companies to make a better profit, he said.
If Shumate’s process proves translatable to industrial-quality silicon solar cells, it could allow companies to meet the DOE goal. It would also solve what Hutchings said is a $5 billion problem in a $32 billion industry where silicon-based cells make up 80 percent of the market.
The Process
Shumate was reading a paper that was published in 1991 unrelated to solar cells, “Boron-hydrogen complexes in crystalline silicon,” when he came across a paragraph that sparked his imagination. He said a physical process described in the paper seemed to lend itself to a perfect solar cell.
“It was a ‘eureka’ moment,” Shumate said. “I think that’s how most innovation happens.”
Shumate, 29, said the process works toward eliminating a problem solar cells have always had — making the top layer of the solar cell very conductive without limiting its efficiency. He said increasing the conductivity of the top layer usually reduces its efficiency.
In the process Shumate developed, hydrogen gas flows over a light-bulb filament, which cracks the hydrogen in two. The atomic hydrogen goes into the top surface of the solar cell changing its electrical properties in a beneficial way.
“We’re effectively tailoring the top layer of the solar cell to be as good as it can be post manufacturing,” Hutchings said.
A $10,000 system was built to test the theoretical benefits, and the company applied for a patent. Shumate and Hutchings also attended several conferences where they discussed their theories with other experts in the field.
“They were pretty excited about it, which made us more excited,” Shumate said. “There was some really, really fun moments in that. Taking a fresh solar cell right out of this system you just built and measuring it and seeing this huge difference in its performance, that was fun.”
Hutchings said that the hydrogenation of the solar cell is an important one for the success of the process.
“We wanted a process that was as plug-and-play as possible in the semiconductor industry,” Hutchings said. “This technology fits really well into that. It’s a single step that happens at the very end of the manufacturing line, so there’s as little disruption as possible.”
Now the challenge is to take the success of the lab-scale solar cell and translate it to a full-size solar cell that can be produced at 4,000 units per hour in a manufacturing plant, Hutchings said.
Longtime friendship
It is evident that Hutchings and Shumate are more than business partners — they are close friends. They often feed off each other’s response and throw out asides that makes the other laugh. They mention that they each served as best man for the other during their respective weddings.
They met in 2000 when Hutchings was a senior and Shumate was a junior at ASMSA. Both played on the soccer team at Hot Springs High School.
Hutchings came to the school from Mena, where he lived with his mother, who worked on a breeding program for a specific bloodline of Arabian horses. They moved to Mena from England when he was 7. In high school, he completed the school’s curriculum two years early.
Instead of going into college as a 16-year-old, he decided to attend ASMSA, where several higher-level math courses and other advanced classes would be available. He looked at it as an opportunity for adventure and a place he could transition into college.
“It really does make the transition to college trivial,” he said about attending ASMSA.
Shumate was attending Conway High School when he decided to apply for ASMSA. He said his family lived outside of the city and he was often bored at home. Once at ASMSA, he didn’t limit himself to just math and science. He took advantage of the literature and language classes that were offered as well as computer programming, which wasn’t offered at Conway at the time. He always took more classes than required, he said.
After graduating from ASMSA, both Hutchings and Shumate attended Hendrix College in Conway. During their time at the school, they took a road trip to Minnesota together to visit the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
“We were walking around in it. It was only about three-feet wide and about a foot deep,” Shumate said.
Now the two men could be said to be doing the same thing, walking in the headwaters of a revolution of advances in solar cell technology.
Birth of PicaSolar
As with any scientific breakthrough, the February 2013 simulation wasn’t the beginning of the project. The original work on the cell began in January 2012, with Silicon Solar Solutions filing a Small Business Innovation Research grant application to help fund the project in June 2012. The grant was approved in January 2013, and one of the requirements for the grant was to develop a business plan for the anticipated success of the research, Shumate said.
Shumate and Hutchings decided to follow a similar route that led to the establishment of Silicon Solar Solutions in 2009. Shumate was in Reeves’ venture development course as part of his doctoral work. Even before he had concrete evidence from the lab that the process would work, he took the idea to class and formed a team with Hutchings serving as a mentor to the group.
“The idea was to a point where having a business plan around it was a good idea,” Shumate said. “That is a very intensive process — writing a 30-some-odd-page business plan with the complexities of does this business plan make sense, is it viable as a business? So this was a great opportunity to go through the process with people who have business backgrounds.”
The group did very well in competitions, winning more than $300,000 in prize money that is benefitting the company’s development. That total includes winning this spring’s MIT NSTAR Clean Energy Prize, which included $150,000 cash award. The company was also awarded a $100,000 prize from the Department of Energy. It was the University of Arkansas’ biggest win cash-wise in a graduate business competition since the university began fielding teams a decade ago.
In April, PicaSolar also won the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup, the state’s top collegiate business-plan competition. Silicon Solar Solutions won third place in the competition in 2010.
PicaSolar’s success has led to a change in how Silicon Solar Solutions operates. Hutchings said it makes sense organizationally to have PicaSolar stand on its own since the technology the company is working on was developed independently from the initial work Silicon Solar Solutions did using the university-licensed technology.
Silicon Solar Solutions has morphed into an incubator of technologies that can then be spun out into separate companies.
“We can leverage government funding to get them to this point and then they can become a separate entity and (we) push them the rest of the way,” Hutchings said. “Success begets success in that if we successfully commercialize any one of the technologies that makes it easier for the next one.”
Reaction has been positive throughout the solar cell industry, both men said, allowing PicaSolar to develop a network of industry and research experts. Some companies have sent PicaSolar their industrial-sized cells on which to test Shumate’s process.
Overcoming the view that it would be unusual for such a technological advance to be developed in Arkansas has been a challenge at times.
“In a lot of the competitions, the judges, the first thing they would ask is why didn’t someone else do this before, someone else meaning someone that’s not from Arkansas,” Shumate said.
This article is featured in the Tangents Fall 2013 issue.