New Product: Edge grinding using Bystronic glass’ champ speed machine offers 99.5% yield

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.

Problem: Cleanly ground edges of substrates are absolutely essential to ensure a smooth production process for solar modules. High edge quality free from cracks and shell defects is the only way to prevent glass breakage during the process. This is an important pre-condition for efficient and economical production since glass breakage is a relevant cost factor and always means a stoppage of the system. Whenever glass breakage occurs, the production systems must be run empty and cleaned, increasing downtime and reducing throughput.

Solution: Thanks to a mineral cast machine bed, champ speed-series machines are completely vibration-free and can therefore provide the greatest precision. Substrates can be ground with extremely fine tolerances of +/- 0.1 mm on absolutely perpendicular sides, even if the starting substrate has large deviations in the angles. As the machines are designed as polar grinding machines with a play-free table, both edges and corners are polished in one pass, with radius or facet. All axes are equipped with maintenance-free and highly dynamic CNC direct drives. The new spindle design works in seconds with two grinding wheels arranged one over the other. Additional time advantages are derived first from an automatic correction of the grinding wheel diameter, with changeover to another module series or substrate size taking less than five minutes, for example, as well as from the use of an automatic changing system for grinding wheels.

Applications: Most glass substrate sizes. Tolerances of +/- 0.1 mm on perpendicular sides.

Platform: The modular layout of the series, champ speed machines can be expanded to create large manufacturing cells with an integrated handling device and additional drilling machine. Champ speed’grind makes it possible to grind edges from a minimum finished dimension of 200 mm x 200 mm to a maximum finished dimension of 2200 mm x 2600 mm with C grind or K grind. The yield is claimed to be 99.5 percent.

Availability: January 2010 onwards.