Dear Bernard.

You seem to have gone to significant lengths to respond to a simple five-word line statement of truth, in my reply to anassumption made by Deepack10Solar on another board.

I would like to thank you for this detailed response since it provides me with a legitimate opportunity and a responsibility to respond to the numerous assumptions in your response, not all of them are made by you.

First, I have no idea who Deepack10solar is and as a result cannot be sure which company he works for (if indeed he even has a job).

You know very well I am involved in a patent application for a non-carbothermic process for manufacturing high purity Silicon from quartz, since you have raised the subject on this discussion forum before, and I have also confirmed this here before.

Please note that it was you who raised this subject, not I, and I recall thanking you for the plug at that time. Thank you Again.

The following discussion is a response to several questions you have raised and to provide some factual technical information that your CTO and PhD’s apparently do not have (although it is information that is readily available as the provided references will show).

I know they certainly cannot have enough information to be able to accurately critique our process since it is not yet public information, but will be very soon (the application is in the process of being published by PCT /WIPO along with the identity of the inventors and owners of the invention).

As I know you are aware that our patent application has entered the National Phase, with all 71 original claims classified as meeting the required 3 classifications that a patent application’s claims must meet to be patentable.These are Novelty (N), (IS) Inventive Step, and (IA) industrially Applicable. Clearly, claims that do not meet these 3 requirements may be adjusted within the confines of the original description to bring them into compliance if it is possible, but cannot be patented unless they meet these three requirements.

In our case, all 71 claims meet these three requirements and as such can be patented as they are, unless the second examination (now underway) turns up a different finding(which is not likely for all 71 claims).

I know this well because I have been through the process successfully over 150 times during my career as a professional inventor, with over 150 issued patents to my credit (in 7 or 8 separate technical disciplines) to prove it.

Many people do not realize that it is a Patent Attorneys duty to earn income for his employer by trying to prove that his client’s claims are patentable. It would be against the business model for a patent attorney to suggest the client’s invention is not patentable, since the client is paying for the service to prove the opposite result.

Comments on our process (reportedly) by your CTO and Apollon;

Since non of these people have access to our patent application, I believe it is premature for them to render a valued technical opinion on it, however it seems clear from some of the comments made that there is a lack of general information on the subject of our process, so I have taken the liberty of having the comments from your PhD’s translated into English (by Google translate), and pasted them below with other information in bold type added by me to help provide answers to some of the things they do not seem to be aware of.

Translated comments from Apollon with My information / comments and reference source links added.

I think this invention is not serious.

It is indeed quite serious, a significant amount of research and development has been incorporated.  

§ The principle is to vaporize silica without carbon.

Yes that is a part of the process, the quartz sand or finely ground quartz is inductively heated in a shallow tungsten tray to above the melting temperature, around 1800 C or so *1. This is actually below the temperature that quartz is presently heated to (~2000 C) in the same way to manufacture type 1 (EN) Fused Quartz Glass (an established and ubiquius industrial process).

Ref 1 Melting point and boiling point data for quartz

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Quartz

CRC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_dioxide

§ The vaporization temperature of the silica is very high even under low pressure !!! 

Actually the vaporization temperature at an easily attainable pressure of ~3500 Pa is about 1720 C *2, Quartz will actually boil (vaporize) at standard pressure(101Kpa) at about 2950 C *1, which is quite a bit below the Arc temperature in a Submerged  Arc Reactor (I can only imagine the evaporation related difiiculties of such an arrangement operating at low pressure conditions).

Ref 2 Vapor pressures vs Kelvin Temperature (Deg C +273)

http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/chemistry/3_4/3_4_4.html

§ Hence many technical problems, not to mention the costs, problems of resistance of materials (silica is very reactive) ...  Silica seems almost as difficult to vaporize as silicon, and evaporation of Si requires a lot of energy under a very high vacuum. 

As was mentioned, Quartz (SiO2) is heated to much higher temperatures in Tungsten crucibles for the industrial manufacturing of type 1 (EN) Fused Quartz Glass, in large quantities in established industrial processes *4, which are operated for profitable processing purposes, so many of the technical difficulties have already been solved. Yes Tungsten is expensive when compaired to Graphite but you onlyneed to build the reactor once, special treatments of it may also be required.

The energy required to vaporise Quartz (SiO2 ) is in fact about 586Kj/mole from the molten state *3 or about 2.71 KW Hrs per Kg .

To reach the molten state the energy required for Quartz (SiO2 ) is about  661 W Hrs per Kilogram*5 .Assuming a Silicon yeild of about 85%  the energy to evaporate 2.524 tons of SiO2 to produce 1.0 MT of Silicon would be about 8.51 MW Hrs of energy, this is less than the standard Carbothermic process energy consumption of approximately 12 MW Hrs per ton.

Ref 3: A Hydrocode equation of state for SiO2, H. J. MELOSH

https://journals.uair.arizona.edu › Home › Vol 42, No 12 (2007) › MELOSH

Ref 4: https://www.raesch.net/en/technology/raesch-quartz-furnace-technology

Ref 5 (requires some calculations from the data provided by NIST):

https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C14808607&Mask=2

§ After there are similar things in the literature but they usually add methane as gas.

No Comment.

It may not be in Apollons business interest to find a favourable aspect to our invention, since they are in part, in the business of cleaning up MaG Si for use in Solar Cell applications, which they are apparently quite expert in doing.

General comments about technical feasibility of our process as a reply to Napoleon (which you posted here Bernard);

“ Now that would be novel and inventive and disruptive….but is it possible?”

The short answer is yes.

As you may be able to tell from the above information, andin combination with the patent application (which will be published soon);

As far as demonstration funding is concerned, we have significantly reduced the risk and cost for our invention and the expense of trials by incorporating data and findings from un-related or somewhat related previous work by other researchers technical publications, as well as by applying established principles of chemistry and thermodynamics.

Of course there will be difficulties to overcome, as I am well aware from experience in new Technology Development, since unlike you, I have been intimately involved with such work very successfully almost all of my working life.

The comment attributed to RRS is patently false, I encourage you to get in touch with the guys at RRS and ask them, I will give them permission to discuss our meeting if you need it.

Just to make things perfectly clear, we are not inviting HPQ participation in this project.

I look forwards to receiving copies of the many approaches KJ has made since the end of September that you have spoken of in your post here, and that I have requested from you by email.

There were several other questions that you asked in your post, that I might answer privately.

KD