Bürkle: Be prepared for the PV revolution

Since Bürkle has joined the Solar Superheroes powered by pv-magazine, they are pushing into the market with a lot of innovations to lower the overall production costs in PV module manufacturing.This helps to reduce the cost of the PV Modules and lower the Levelized Cost of Electricity and makes it more competitive against the conventional energy sources like coal, gas or nuclear power.

“The Solar Superheroes, fighting against the enemies like coal and oil, standing for the belief in the solar industry has been published in several pv-magazines since summer 2015. This inspired us to further work and innovates in the path of energy cost reduction. Even though the PV market has changed dramatically in the past view years, Bürkle unaffectedly kept working on new developments of machine design and process,” Michael Essich Sales Director of Bürkle mentioned. Taking this inspiration with company philosophy Bürkle has further developed their lamination systems to reduce process time, continuously improve throughput and make the machine with higher flexibility.

Bürkle therefore has optimized their Short Lamination (SL) Process. With this process, the customers can run same process time as in a 2 step lamination process in only one lamination step and therefore reduce the overall cost per module by up to 25 per cent.

The machine related costs like energy-consumption, maintenance, wear parts, floor space and staff costs can be considerably lowered.

Bürkle's Lamination Line e.a.sy-Lam VFF is able to laminate various encapsulation foils and glass thicknesses. The VFF is used in this machine design; the lamination process is combined in two stages: firstly in a vacuum lamination step using a membrane (prelamination, evacuation and sealing of a module) and subsequently for final lamination in a flat presses that is heated from both sides. These two lamination steps, which are consecutively arranged, are followed by double side cooling step. This configuration is perfect for Dual-Glass Modules and Standard Modules. Now even the falt presses of the VFF can be easily retrofit to a membrane presses by adding a membrane in the second and the third step. This allows customer to run any kind of module design on this machine. With this lamination system customers are prepared for any future module design changes in the market.

These features and flexibilities also transferred to the Multi stack Laminators to reach high volume production capacity. This high volume production capacity on small foot print with highest flexibility will reduce the overall production cost even further. The homogenous cross-linking which is realized with the homogenous oil heating plate minimises material stress and radically reduces warping of the modules. An additional advantage is that no over-pressing or pinching occurs at the module edges. Resultantly, the solar modules shows an absolutely uniform module thickness, which means that there is no local stress inside the modules. This quality advantage contributes to an increased life time of the module in the field and increase the energy output for the end customers.

“Most often concerns from the customer in using our SL-Process Technology is the temperature over 160°C. But according to ITRI’s research, situated in Taiwan, higher temperature shows better transparency and better cross-linking of the EVA encapsulation.

That means the result are even more advantages than just the faster lamination time.” explains Mr. Robert Gaiser Project Manager in the PV Business from Bürkle. Furthermore Bürkle is offering Roller Coater machines RCLM in different Roller size, to apply an ARC coating on Solar Glass or apply photoresist on flat substrate. When light hits glass surfaces, a significant part is reflected back and absorbed depending on the glass thickness. The losses due to reflection and absorption are an amount up to 8% and reduce directly the performance and the efficiency of photovoltaics or solar thermal systems. A layer of so-called anti-reflective coating materials (AR) applied onto the glass surface with the Roller Coating Machine e.a.sy-Coater RCLM permits an increase in the efficiency. A rubber-covered application roller transfers the liquid sol-gel AR coating material onto the glass panel surface. In order to obtain a perfectly homogeneous coating layer grooved application rollers are used.

For more information about Bürkle and their systems, please visit Hall A2-Booth 120, Intersolar Europe Munich (June 21-24, 2016).