Tau Science targets solar industry with assist from OSU

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Oregon State University sstudents use Tau Science's Flash QE to test solar cells.

Tau Science has partnered with Oregon State University to develop a beta version of its latest solar product for use at the school. Students at OSU’s Oregon Process Innovation Center for Sustainable Solar Cell Manufacturing will now be testing Tau’s Flash QE, thanks to a $190,000 grant from the Oregon Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center to OSU to fund its purchase.

The partnership is helping Beaverton-based Tau Science gain a foothold in the growing solar industry while giving OSU students a chance to broaden research related to sustainable solar manufacturing.

Tau Science is designing products to guarantee quality for solar cells, a sticky issue for manufacturers while industry-standard warranties run long.

“Solar panels have a 25-year warranty and I don’t know where that number came from but everybody deeply regrets that number. I can’t think of any other product that gives a 25-year warranty except maybe roofing material,” said Jamie Hudson, president of Tau Science.

Regardless, solar manufacturers are beginning to incur their first significant costs for cell failure. Tau Science — named for the Tau parameter, which measures the lifespan of solar cells — designs equipment intended to avoid cell failure and its related costs.

The three-year-old company’s first product, IRIS, detects hot spots in solar cells, or a defect in the cell that can lead to overheating and module breakdown. The product will be integrated into the manufacturing line at one unnamed solar manufacturer next year.

IRIS sales will fund Tau Science as the four-man company develops its second product, Flash QE. Both are priced at about $150,000 per unit.

The grant to OSU allowed Tau Science to build its first Flash QE system. For OSU students, Flash QE is facilitating graduate student work, a study partnership with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the opportunity to conduct future research for companies in the solar space.

FlashQE improves upon a technique known as quantum efficiency. It was invented in the National Renewable Energy Lab by David Young and licensed by Tau for product development. Because sunlight comes in a variety of colors — think: rainbow — solar manufacturers aspire to convert as many photons of each color as possible into electrons. The amount of light that gets converted into power as a function of color, or wavelength, is measured on what's called the quantum efficiency curve.

Taking the measurement of that curve takes as much as 10 minutes, making thorough testing possible for only one of every 100,000 or more solar cells. FlashQE, however, can generate the same information in just one second by using different colors of LEDs modulated at different frequencies, which allows each wavelength to be measured in parallel.

“The major thing is it's just much, much faster,” Hudson said.

Flash QE is designed to sit in the manufacturing line and look at quantum efficiency in every solar cell. It was released in June at a photovoltaic conference in Seattle, on the heels of winning a R&D Magazine 100 Award in June, which recognize the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace every year.

OSU students are working to map quantum efficiency over a cell with scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and look at other finer elements of cell structure using Flash QE.

“The center is set up to facilitate collaboration for small businesses,” said Chih-Hung Chang, director of the Oregon Process Innovation Center and a PhD professor of chemical engineering. “For the long run, I foresee large companies will be interested in using this tool” in business-related research.

Looking ahead, Tau Science is “bullish” on selling the Flash QE product, said Hudson.

“We got a really big bounce out of that (Seattle) conference,” he said. He declined to mention leads but said approximately 10 solar manufacturers have inquired about Flash QE.

As the product develops, Hudson envisions ramping up sales overseas, where he said investment in green technology is considerably higher per capita than in the United States. Korea, Japan, China and Germany are all targets, in addition to the U.S. market.

Hudson said Tau is breaking even on the IRIS.

"We think this industry is extremely young still. It’s less than 1 percent of a $4 trillion market,” he said. “I think there is a lot of room for this industry to grow."

Lee van der Voo, lvdvoo*at*gmail.com, is a freelance writer for Sustainable Business Oregon.