It's dolomite, baby!
Like Professor Farnsworth, my first thought was also Rudy Ray Moore.
obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfgKJ9G_2fg
Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#12"Each atomic step would normally take over 5,000 CPU hours on a supercomputer. Now, we can do the same calculation in 2 milliseconds on a desktop," Is this phrase equivalent to "Each atomic step would take 5,000 hours on a desktop. Now, it takes 2 CPU milliseconds on a supercomputer."? ^^
no, if you swap the computers around the difference grows rather than staying the same
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#13This is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way. If so it would cut the cost of silicon solar cells significantly (a big chunk of their cost is the cost of the ingot, the ingot cost is a function of time to produce, producing them quickly would get more ingots per unit time from a given reactor). Another crystal structure that would be useful would be sapphire for thing…
One of the authors on LinkedIn definately thinks so. Looks like more papers are coming https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wenhao-sun-20383b7b_ten-years....
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#14This is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way. If so it would cut the cost of silicon solar cells significantly (a big chunk of their cost is the cost of the ingot, the ingot cost is a function of time to produce, producing them quickly would get more ingots per unit time from a given reactor). Another crystal structure that would be useful would be sapphire for thing…
> This is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way.
No really. The way we grow silicon crystals is already very efficient and would not be improved by this sort of thing. We grow them by pulling a seed (in carefully controlled conditions, with a bit of twisting and other tweaks, but still), adding dissolutions steps would waste a lot of time. Besides, the defects they get rid of by dissolution (say, a magnesium atom on a calcium site, which we call antisite defects) do not exist in silicon, in which all atoms are identical.
> Another crystal structure that would be useful would be sapphire for things like sapphire screens and other covers.
Again, sapphire is something that is quite easy to grow. And like for silicon, it does not have any antisite defects. One of the limitations with growing sapphire is its purity, and it would not be improved by additional dissolution steps.
I am not saying that similar steps could not be used to help produce industrially relevant crystals, just that silicon and sapphire are very unlikely to be examples of that. This is a way to grow in a lab in weeks a crystal that would take millions of years to grow in nature. It would not really help with crystals that grow already very efficiently, and whose growth is controlled by other mechanisms.
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#15For those people, who also wondered what dolomite exactly was, beside a mountain range:
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#16This is an interesting result. It makes me wonder if you could grow a silicon ingot in this way. If so it would cut the cost of silicon solar cells significantly (a big chunk of their cost is the cost of the ingot, the ingot cost is a function of time to produce, producing them quickly would get more ingots per unit time from a given reactor). Another crystal structure that would be useful would be sapphire for thing…
Gallium nitride perhaps.
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#17For those people, who also wondered what dolomite exactly was, beside a mountain range: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolomite_(mineral)
Saw some beautiful dolomite bluffs along the Katy Trail in Missouri earlier this year. (Until I saw a sign talking about them I had assumed they were limestone.)
These are along the Missouri River — so no doubt a historically flooding/drying spot that they mentioned in the article.
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#18It's dolomite, baby!
The tough black mineral that won’t cop out when there’s heat all about!
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#19Further reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolemite
Re: Scientists succeed in growing dolomite in the lab
#20It's dolomite, baby!