Enpei Zhao
Pronouns: He/Him/His
UROP Fellowship: University of Michigan Energy Institute
Research Mentor(s): Neil Dasgupta, PhD
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Presentation Date: Thursday, July 30, 2020 | Session 2 | Presenter: 3
Authors: Enpei Zhao, Daniel Penley, Tae Cho, Neil Dasgupta
Abstract
Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a useful manufacturing technique that allows one to control surfaces and interfaces by depositing thin films on high-aspect ratio surfaces utilizing self-limiting reactions. The precursors in a traditional ALD process are separated temporally, but can be separated spatially in a process called spatial atomic layer deposition (SALD). SALD can achieve up to two orders of magnitude higher throughout compared to conventional ALD primarily because the process can be performed at atmospheric pressure. Furthermore, it can be integrated with roll-to-roll manufacturing system. This manufacturing advantage results in drastically reduced cost and complexity that could help to address the large-scale manufacturing needs of the perovskite photovoltaic solar cells as well as batteries production.
Currently, the Dasgupta Research Group at the University of Michigan is developing a customized SALD system that has active control over many of the relevant process parameters. The current SALD system has all the necessary hardware components set up and connected. However, the python interface software used by the SALD system not only ran into unexpected bugs and failed to work but was also lacking essential features/modules.
In this year’s UROP project, I fixed the software first by re-constructing the communication between the control software interface and all the hardware components that are used to control the SALD system, including the linear stages, the mass flow controllers, and the stepper motors. In addition, we also fixed the coding bugs and improved algorithms used for all features to make them more efficient. The last thing we did was to create a module in the software for controlling temperature of the substrate and depositor heads. While we were constantly improving and fixing the software code issues, we also periodically fixed the hardware components setup and tested the software code on the actual SALD machine. As the UROP project approached the end, the software was fixed, worked properly and new features/modules were successfully added.
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Research Disciplines
Engineering
