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About this episode

Solar power and other renewable energy sources are increasingly in the news these days. Dr Whitman will describe the physics behind solar cells and the technical challenges of mass producing them. She will also describe the String Ribbon fabrication process developed by Evergreen Solar. This process results in the lowest silicon waste and energy consumption in the industry. The new state of the art facility in Devens is highly automated and has the capacity to product a solar panel every two minutes. Lynnette Whitman is a Senior Process Engineer at Evergreen Solar, where she is responsible for final product quality and inline process and product improvements. She earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend IN. Her doctorate dissertation explored the feasibility of combining two environmentally benign chemicals, supercritical carbon dioxide and ionic liquids, as a novel reaction and separation scheme. This work led to over a dozen publications as well as national and international conference presentations.

• Release Date

  May 28, 2010

• Runtime

  01:50:56