Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

Product Briefing Outline: Bystronic glass now offers the champ speed-series of glass substrate edge grinders, using experience gained from the automotive industry to provide clean, ground edges, free from cracks and shell defects, boosting yield and productivity in PV module production. The champ speed-series machines are completely vibration-free and can therefore provide the greatest precision in edge grinding.

Product Briefing Outline: Festo has introduced a Bernoulli Gripper for transporting delicate work pieces such as solar cells and wafers. The most particular benefit of the gripper is the minimized air consumption which reduces the energy costs. Other essential aspects are little swinging power, high grip force, low-pressure applications and a constant area load.

Unlike news stories, which generally have a short lifespan, but higher visitor levels, new product reviews can often prove popular for several months or more. Excluding the PV-Tech homepage, the Product Briefings section is the fourth most visited section of the site in 2009.  In collating the Top 10 new product reviews of 2009, many product reviews in particular stood out for having an extremely long shelf-life that with some started in 2008, yet continued to attract readers throughout the year.

Product Briefing Outline: Siemens has introduced a new Gas Chromatograph (GC) that can be used in the very demanding polysilicon production process. The MAXUM II PGC will help to maximize the polysilicon output to ensure stable and high quality material, minimizing off-spec products.  This results in significant cost reductions with a typical return of investment of less than one year for a typical plant, according to the company.

Product Briefing Outline: Honeywell Electronic Materials has launched a new material called Honeywell SOLARC that improves the efficiency and power output of PV module. The new product is a transparent coating material that improves the light transmittance through the glass that covers the solar cells.

Product Briefing Outline: Perlast Ltd is launching its latest 'clean', high performance fluoroelastomer (FKM) material for solar panel manufacture. Called V75SC, the elastomer is designed for CVD, PECVD and PVD vacuum deposition processes. It offers low particulation in these critical sealing applications, together with cost advantages over perfluoroelastomer seals.

Product Briefing Outline: LumaSense Technologies has launched its Mikron M7604F and M7604G thermal imaging cameras. The Mikron M7604 camera is a versatile, fully-radiometric camera with high-temperature functionality making it the perfect tool for preventive maintenance inspections, radiometric inspections of internal furnaces and (M7604F) or temperature measurements of glass surfaces (M7604G) for improving process control and product quality.

Product Briefing Outline: The alpha500 from WITec is an automated microscope system combining Confocal Raman Microscopy for chemical 3-D imaging and Atomic Force Microscopy for high resolution structural surface imaging which allows comprehensive characterization of various solar cell materials on the nano- and micrometer scale.

Product Briefing Outline: ACI-ecotec GmbH & Co. KG has developed a new inline wafer separation system suitable for separating mono- and polycrystalline wafers in all common formats with thicknesses of up to 120 µm. The new ecoSplit IXL has an output capacity of at least 3000 wafers per hour, and the especially gentle, patented separation technology makes it possible to reduce breakage rates to a low as 0.1%.

Product Briefing Outline: Targray Technology now offers the Peak Sun POCl3, which is claimed to be the highest purity N-type dopant available to the solar cell manufacturing industry.  Phosphorus Oxychloride (POCl3) is liquid phosphorus used as an N-type dopant in the diffusion process for silicon wafers. Peak Sun’s high purity 99.99999%, 7N, reduces variability in bin distribution, increases minority carrier lifetimes which contribute to higher conversion efficiencies (CE) and provides consistency in the diffusion process. All of which contribute towards a lower manufacturing cost per watt.