TECHNOLOGYAUTOMATION
Attaining a credible product quality in PV does indeed require a deeper understanding of which of the manufacturing process parameters is responsible for driving which effect on the product quality. While most of today’s PV manufacturers already have the right manufacturing equipment in place to influence these parameters, they don’t seem to know the right levers to pull
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The PV industry on the other hand has clearly underestimated both the power and necessity of MES. Typical reactions to why MES couldn’t help in PV (as much as it has in semiconductor) revolve around the fact that most PV manufacturing equipment doesn’t provide dynamic recipe control (yet!) and wouldn’t benefit from such a system. PV manufacturing processes are not completely mature and they are many are not as well understood as they could be in many cases – a textbook example of a situation demanding for a powerful tool to help!
More than just automation To the surprise of many the MES actually does provide a lot of features for PV
manufacturing which - even without dynamic recipe control, turn out to be crucial to achieve high quality manufacturing results. Process data collection with the MES on all process- and measurement equipments reveals cross process patterns.
The data collected in the MES can be used to compare and correlate process settings with process results, detect deviations within the data and automatically initiate counter actions preventing further damage. Another huge, if not the biggest, enabler for a maximum throughput of a production line is manufacturing equipment uptime utilization. Often underestimated, the MES
doesn’t only collect equipment status and alarm data but also classifies and correlates these with existing process or maintenance patterns. This ability for example provides the very basis for the MES to actively route material dynamically between different manufacturing work centres for load balancing.
Attaining a distinguished product quality in PV does indeed require a deeper understanding of which of the manufacturing process parameters is responsible for driving which effect on the product quality.
While most of today’s PV manufacturers already have the right manufacturing equipment in place to influence these parameters, they don’t seem to know the right levers to pull .
The question is how they learn to differentiate between parameters that are important and those that are not. Squeezing out the last bit of performance is not easy, but other industries such as semiconductor shows that it always can be done by using the right tools.
In summary the answer to our initial question seems very simple after all: “All it takes for a modern PV manufacturer to achieve a high product quality for a low cost is to deeply understand and to continuously optimize the manufacturing processes. A very efficient way to achieve this is to simply put on that MES tool belt.”
Right: Modern automated production line in solar panel factory
www.solar-pv-management.com Issue V 2010
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