PV equipment specialist Despatch Industries is set to launch its new Safire firing furnace and accompanying dryer technology at EU PVSEC in Frankfurt, Germany next week. The company also noted that PV manufacturer, Nice Sun PV Co had completed high-volume production testing of the Safire furnace that demonstrated a 0.1% absolute improvement in overall efficiency on a baseline product and up to 0.13% on some product types.
“The solar industry and our customers are continuously driven to reduce the overall cost per watt of the solar cells they produce,” states John Farrell, managing director, Despatch solar business unit. “When we developed the Safire, we focused on providing a next generation firing platform that has a measurable impact on productivity and yield and that provides a solution to support advanced cell structures. The Safire's performance at Nice Sun exceeded our expectations and we look forward to bringing these performance results to all of our customers.”
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According to XuDong Zhu, Nice Sun general manager, “We were also impressed with the impact the Safire had on reducing the number of lower efficiency cells being produced and the improvement in the production metrics for cells manufactured on the Safire line. Through our cooperation with Despatch and the use of Safire we have been able to realize an increase in our overall production performance and profitability in a very challenging market.”
Despatch also noted that the new tool includes thermal profile tailoring features needed with advanced metallization and passivation layer technologies such as short peak or spike as well as distributed temperature capabilities. This is supported by the platforms dual, independent chambers which have no lane-to-lane influences.
Despatch said that it had several poster presentations at the conference that would be covering the Safire firing furnace capabilities.