Germany-based Dr. Schenk GmbH are a leading solutions provider for the PV industry, improving material quality and efficiency and reducing waste through their inspection and measurement systems. PES speaks to Managing Director Michael Dobler.
PES: Welcome to PES magazine, can you firstly explain a little about your role, and how it relates to the PV industry?
Michael Dobler: I’m the Managing Director of Schenk, and in my role I’m responsible for the development and sales strategies within the company.
Our company, Schenk, is well-known in the PV sector. We recognised this as an important market years ago and invested in systems that detect local defects and measure overall material properties for quality and process control at every step in the production line.
PES: And can you tell us a little about your company, and the solutions you provide?
MD: The company was founded in 1985 in Germany. Today, we have over 200 employees worldwide with subsidiaries in the US, China, Korea, and Taiwan. We also have local representatives in many other countries.
Schenk provide high-speed local defect and overall material property inspection solutions for a variety of applications, including PV which is a very important market for us. We currently have more than 12,000 installed solutions of modular standard units and highly customised systems.
Our solutions are based on a sophisticated optical concept, which is custom-tailored to each application; in-line CCD cameras scan at high speed and are able to detect and qualify even the smallest defect, which means our customers save time and money by not processing defective materials.
We also provide additional measurement options with our product series ‘EasyMeasure’ software, such as I-V Curve Tracer. The system enables exact measurements of every single cell’s performance on every panel as opposed to only the panel’s overall performance; this reduces the amount of error checking necessary to locate underperforming cells and saves material and time.
We will be at booth B3G/B2 at the EU PVSEC in Hamburg to explain our solutions.
