Closure for silica glass crucible, silica glass crucible and method of handling the same

Abstract

A closure for silica glass crucible to be mounted on an opening portion of a silica glass crucible is provided with a peripheral edge mounting portion closely adhered to an inner peripheral end of the opening portion.

Description

BACKGROUND[0001]1. Field of the Invention[0002]This invention relates to a silica glass crucible, especially a silica glass crucible used in a pulling step for the production of a single crystalline silicon, and particularly provides a structure of avoiding intrusion of foreign matter into an inner face of the manufactured silica glass crucible during storing or conveying of the crucible.[0003]2. Description of the Related Art[0004]In the production of single crystalline silicon, it is common that a silica glass crucible used in the melting of polycrystalline silicon as a starting material is cleaned and inspected after the manufacture, and consequently an acceptable product is packed for delivery. With the increase in the purity of semiconductor materials, it is important to suppress various contaminations during the production of single crystalline silicon, and it is also desired to control contamination of a silica glass crucible to minimum. Concretely, when the silica glass cruc...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011]It is, therefore, an object of the invention to provide a way of avoiding the intrusion of the aforementioned raw material powder for crucible in the inner face of the crucible to thereby surely avoid the intrusion of foreign matters into the silica glass crucible until the time of actually using the crucible and to enable the handling of the crucible at a state of not being contaminated.

[0022]According to the invention, the intrusion of raw material powder for a silica glass crucible into the inner face of the crucible and hence the intrusion of foreign matters into the silica glass crucible are avoided surely, so that it is possible to handle the silica glass crucible at such a state that the inner face is not contaminated over a period from the delivery of the crucible to the melting step of polycrystalline silicon.

Problems solved by technology

Especially in recent years, the size of the silica glass crucible tends to be gradually increased for enhancing the production efficiency of single crystalline silicon, and hence it is not easy to handle such a larger-size crucible.

For example, such a crucible is apt to be easily contaminated during operation such as inspection or packing after the manufacture.

Although it becomes particularly possible to avoid contamination at delivery by wrapping with the apparatus described in the above patent document to store the silica glass crucible at the cleaned state, contamination on the inner face of the crucible is not yet prevented completely.

In this case, there is no means for avoiding the intrusion of foreign matters into the inner face of the crucible.

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