4 Common Uses Of Silicon (Si)

What is Silicon?

Silicon (Si) is a chemical component that makes up 27.7% of the Earth’s crust by mass, making it one of most abundant elements present on our planet. It’s also one of the fundamental constituents of the universe and comes with useful properties such as being heat-resistant, electrically conductive, shiny, and brittle. That being said, there are a variety of uses for the 14^th element on the Periodic Table.

What is silicon used for?

1. Electronics

High-purity silicon is created by thermally decomposing the ultra-pure trichlorosilane. This process is followed by silicon’s recrystallisation, which is used to create many types of electronics, including semiconductors, transistors, printed circuit boards, and integrated circuits. For transistors, the material is doped by adding a small impurity which enables the electrons to move around, conduct electricity, and create reliable semiconductors for voltage. When heated into a molten state, silicon can be formed into semi-conductive wafers to serve as the base for integrated circuits, or microchips.

2. Silicone

Silicon is used to create silicone, which chemically are silicon-oxygen polymers with methyl groups attached. Silicone oil is typically used as a lubricant added to create cosmetics, hair conditioners, and shampoos. Silicone can also be used to create rubber for waterproof sealants in washrooms and windows, pipes and roofs. Because it’s a good insulator, silicone is used to create casings for electrical appliances. In the medical industry, silicone is used in certain implants, catheters, contact lenses, and bandages.

3. Solar panels

For the most part, solar cells and solar panels are created using silicon wafers, simply because of their semiconducting properties, as well as their abundance. Silicon has a solar band efficiency of 1.1 eV, which makes it a reasonable option to be used.

4. High power lasers

The most powerful silicon-based laser is able to rack up a record 111°C temperature, with a threshold current per unit area of 200 A/cm²  and an output power of 100 mW. It’s likely that silicon-based electronics has probably reached its limits, but silicon photonics has also been a source of interest, which combines the photonics and electronics to create ultra-fast optical data processing.

Source: Wonderful Engineering

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