Bürkle Introduces New Production Technologies for Solar Modules

Bürkle Managing Director Hans-Joachim Bender will be presenting at this year’s Munich Intersolar Europe Exhibition (8th to 10th June 2011, hall A5, booth 489) a new method of lamination that will reduce lamination cycle time for Glass Foil Modules by nearly one-half. This process designed for Bürkle’s Two Step standard process has been developed for both the Multi-Opening Ypsator, now termed the Ypsator-SL, and the single daylight e.a.sy-Lam SL. This new series of lamination systems, for which Bürkle has applied for patents, has been developed after months of development in Bürkle’s Freudenstadt Germany’s Innovation Center. Currently Laboratory testing has been started to verify the lamination results.

Another new process technology for the lamination of thin glass panels having thickness of 1.3mm is also being announced. Typically, the standard sizes of glass panels currently range from 3 to 4 mm. “There is increasing demand for thinner modules. Laminating thin modules is especially challenging” says Dagmar Metzger, PV Lamination Product Manager, “as this thin material seemingly can be rolled up like paper. Even for this process it is an important advantage that Bürkle laminators do not feature a supporting frame around the modules for laminating glass-glass modules.

Bürkle continues to develop new technologies and has become in only 4 years the leading lamination system provider for PV Modules having shipped over 100 systems to date. Bürkle’s has shipped over 25 Lamination Lines for glass-glass modules to date which is a testimony to the innovation and success of Bürkle’s R&D efforts to date.

Bürkle’s Coating Division has also been active developing a process for coating thin liquid Anti-Reflective material to glass modules thereby capturing more of the sun’s light thereby improving the efficiency of the module. Estimates range from 2-3% improvement of the existing module efficiency using the new A/R materials.
Bürkle’s efforts to continue to press “Grid Parity” by developing new manufacturing processes and equipment is a long standing principle of Bürkle’s design and Research and Development goals and activities.