The J. Ray and Priscilla J. Bowen Endowment was established by former UW Dean of Engineering and Chemical Engineering Faculty member, J. Ray Bowen, to recognize outstanding student performance in senior design projects.  Prof. Eric Stuve reports on the 2015 Bowen Design Award Winners. 

The project for CHEM E 486 capstone design class was to design a solar cell manufacturing facility to produce silicon solar cells at the rate of 250 megawatts of peak power per year.  Students worked in groups of 3-4 to develop a design consisting of crystalline and polysilicon purification, sawing of silicon ingots, and fabrication into solar cells by unit processes of texturizing, doping and diffusion, plasma etching, and screen printing of contacts.  Since the overall process has no recycle stream, and since the solar cells are not of commodity status, the process design depends on the quality of the solar cell produced.  The overall design is therefore optimized to obtain the economically sustainable price (ESP), essentially the price for zero total discounted cash flow, of the cell.  The ESP takes into account cell efficiency and cost, and investment parameters.

There were many good designs submitted by the students, but Group Apollo's stood out among them.  Ahmed Alamer, Derek DeGraff, Brian Gibbon, and Katie Hickman, the members of Group Apollo, prepared a report covering every aspect of solar cell fabrication in exquisite detail.  Their research extended well into the scientific literature.  Despite the difficulty in estimating equipment costs, Group Apollo found *actual* equipment costs and incorporated those costs into their optimization to obtain an ESP consistent with current technology.  They took their results further to determine the leveled cost of electricity (LCOE), the average cost a consumer would pay based on solar cell cost, financing, location of installation, and cell lifetime.

Their work went well beyond the expectations of the class and was an example of what teamwork and team organization can achieve.  They are most deserving of the Bowen Design Award for 2015.