Living in today’s world where the products we use need to meet a rigorous set of parameters, innovative production and processing techniques are enabling producers to reach these goals in a cost-effective manner. However, the processes are only as good and efficient as the components that are used in the production environment. Innovative and efficient vacuum pumps are a quintessential part of any production line by providing safe operation, meeting process conditions effectively, guaranteeing high uptime reliability, and ensuring a low Cost of Ownership (CoO) through minimal maintenance and service requirements. In solar industry photovoltaic (PV) value-added chain, the use of vacuum pumps spans a wide range of processes from production of raw materials (solar-grade silicon) to lamination of thin-film or crystalline-Si based modules. I will discuss here some of these processes and the specific demands they have on modern vacuum pumps.
Introduction
The use of vacuum pumps is not entirely novel in the solar industry. Most of the CVD and PVD processes used for producing PV modules are well known from the semiconductor and glass coating industry. Deposition method of TCO layers on glass for thin-film solar modules either through sputtering or LPCVD has remained largely unchanged from the flat panel display time. Amorphous or micro-crystalline silicon (a/µc-Si) deposition and anti-reflective silicon-nitride (Si3N4) layer on wafers using PECVD technique is extensively used in the semiconductor sector. Although the basic need to have an oxidant-free environment has remained the same for the solar PV industry, much larger particle loads and larger gas flows encountered here require vacuum pumps to demonstrate high robustness and uptime reliability.
