Inline Inspection Tools for Photovoltaic Manufacturing
- $2.25m Funded by ARENA
- $5.17m Total project cost
Summary
This project developed two inline inspection tools, which are integrated into solar cell manufacturing ‘lines’ to help solar research organisations reduce the cost of manufacturing photovoltaic cells.
Need
Variable yields and product quality during the production process cost the photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing industry $2 billion each year. Improving both can reduce the cost of solar PV cells.
This project consists of:
Learn more
Report: BT Imaging
This report details an overview of the design and build two new products, the iLSL2 and the LIS-B1.
Project innovation
This project developed two inline inspection tools, which are integrated into cell manufacturing ‘lines’ to help solar research organisations reduce the cost of manufacturing PV cells.
The first tool finds hard to detect micro-cracks in silicon wafers and cells during the manufacturing of silicon wafers, cells and modules.
The second delivers process control as well as quality control and sorting of multi-crystalline and mono-crystalline silicon blocks (the raw material in photovoltaic cells).
The specialist tools will help reduce costs by predicting cell performance, managing material quality control, identifying process and material faults, and implementing control and debug measures.
They were developed by in-house photoluminescence and photovoltaic technology experts in collaboration with leading industry players who will also be buyers of the tools as they are released for commercial use.
Benefit
The tools developed in this project will assist solar cell manufacturers by enabling them to efficiently produce high-performance silicon photovoltaic technologies using cost-effective yield, quality and process management.
