Hans-Joachim Bender, Bürkle GmbH’s Managing Director, discusses Bürkle’s success with the entire Bürkle Photovoltaic manufacturing equipment product line including Single-Opening and Multi-Opening Lamination Systems and their broad array of Coating Systems applying liquid materials for Anti-Reflective Coating as well as other unique coating applications.”We reviewed this business application thoroughly in 2003 based upon our core technologies and experience of over 90 years”, Bender says. “At that time the market was not driven as strongly as it is now so we put off the design projects, but in the back of my mind I knew that we had the right blend of unique technologies for this important new market. The time came in 2006 when we realized that the market was growing and it was time for us to put our design teams to work blending our experience in high value, high volume production systems providing consistently uniform processes, high system utilization and a system providing lower costs per piece of anything currently on the market. Our e.a.sy-Lam Single-Opening Laminations Systems and our Multi-Opening Ypsator products are now in the market and in just 2 ½ years we have installed over 4 Giga Watts of production capacity worldwide”.
Bender continues, “Our Vision is to provide and support manufacturing systems worldwide that meet the needs of the market”. To meet that objective we focused on unique design criteria providing:
• Uniform module thickness across the solar module without using “Frames” during the
lamination process for Glass-Glass modules.
• A reduction of cycle time using a “Split” Lamination process
• Ability to laminate Glass-Glass modules using a variety of encapsulate materials
including such materials as EVA, PVB, Ionomer, TPU, TPO and other encapsulate
materials.
• A process providing uniform module temperatures after lamination assuring
consistent module efficiency testing and reducing internal stress inside the module.
“This design philosophy has allowed us to serve the market with over 100 systems worldwide. Over 25% of these systems are of the Multi-Opening configuration for Glass-Glass Thin Film Module applications”.
