Features

Product Briefing Outline: Rohm and Haas Company has launched its new line of ‘Enlight’ materials suite of products for crystalline silicon cell photovoltaic manufacturing. The Enlight product suite is designed to improve traditional solar cell processing by increasing cell efficiency and increasing manufacturing yields.

Product Briefing Outline: The TITAN TRACKER 122-219 ATR PRECISION is a new concept in solar trackers and has been developed for flat-plate and high concentrating photovoltaics  CPV). It breaks with the usual trend, based on mounted-pole systems, and is claimed to offer improved benefits during the whole life-cycle of the installation.

Siemens AG has developed and manufactured inverters for photovoltaic applications since 1987. The latest products of this development are the SINVERT PV inverters, a family of three phase grid-connected inverters in the range of 60kVA up to 1700kVA.

Product Briefing Outline: Buerkle GmbH has introduced its multi-opening module laminator that can process both crystalline and thin-film photovoltaic cells. The ‘Ypsator’ system laminates up to 20 modules per cycle. On a surface area of 3.5m² per opening and five openings, manufacturers can produce 10 photovoltaic modules per batch at the same time. The total annual capacity is around 500,000 modules, which corresponds to an annual power capacity of 40 megawatts.

Product Briefing Outline: SierraTherm Production Furnaces has introduced its new 5500 Series APCVD system with a 660mm deposition width.  This tool is capable of depositing a combination of up to five layers of doped (BSG, PSG) and undoped SiO2 films in a single pass. Its throughput capacity of 1875 WPH for 156mm wafers or 2300 WPH of 125mm wafers make it compatible with today’s high production cell lines.  Films with thicknesses of up to 300nm can be deposited at this process speed.

Product Briefing Outline: The ‘Eyelit Manufacturing’ solution delivers a full featured, technically advanced manufacturing execution system (MES), asset management, product costing, plant-level connectivity hub, and broad spectrum of other essential functionality. By giving clear insight into production process efficiency, performance/equipment efficiency, inventory control and resource management along with the ability to automatically react to conditions in any factory system, Eyelit Manufacturing suite enables customers to coordinate, control, and respond to changing demands in production.

Product Briefing Outline: DEK has introduced the PVP1200 screen printer capable of 1,200 wafers-per-hour (WPH) throughput and offering advanced automated features for high speed and repeatability. The PVP1200 is built using expertise gained from DEK’s established high-accuracy screen printing platforms, proven in surface-mount assembly and chip-scale semiconductor packaging.

23rd European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition held in Valencia, Spain last week was one of the best events I have attended in over 15 years of attending trade shows in most parts of the world.

Product Briefing Outline: Coveme SpA’s new ‘dyMat PYE’ backsheet material is used to prevent electrical hazards and to grant high vapour barrier, thus avoiding power loss during the expected lifetime of the solar module. Coveme, in co-operation with DuPont Teijin Films, has developed a high grade PET inner layer with a lifetime five times longer than traditional polyester. Traditional solutions are multiple layer backsheets with fluoropolymers on the air side, polyester (PET) in the middle, and a third layer towards the cell side. Most of the job is done by the polyester film that must be protected by an outer layer versus the air side.