For more than 50 years, Italian-based Bottero has been a world leader in every sector of the glass industry including hollow glass, special engineering, flat laminated and monolithic glass. The company offers a wide range of reliable products thanks to its policy of continuous investment in research and development …
Back in the 1970s when Bottero started producing production equipment for patterned glass at its Cuneo headquarters, the PV industry was at the initial research and development stage. At that time patterned glass was widely used in the building industry. It proved a relatively simple process for Bottero to update a well-proven technology for PV glass. Nowadays more than 15 Bottero outlets are producing PV patterned glass for a worldwide market.
The PV industry grew up very quickly and now the same thing is happening in PV module manufacturing, developing some of the key technologies like the stringer, the lamination or the core processes of thin-layer deposition, in order to reach the best possible efficiency of the PV panel. But now it seems competition is becoming increasingly intense and the key to success for the PV module producers market is to increase production, while simultaneously reducing the cost/watt.
Currently several manufacturers have assembly lines with low levels of automation and several people involved in heavy and no-added value operations. Also production is widely moving to low labour cost countries where maintaining good quality can prove more difficult. The request for higher automation is becoming more and more frequent and Bottero can use their wide experience in automatic glass handling to become solution-provider partner for the PV industry as it enters this new phase.
Updating and re-engineering their experience, Bottero created a package of production improvements, called Move to the next Level, dedicated to the PV industry. This entails:
