Renewable energies industry Production of solar cells
The production of solar cells is a capital-intensive industry. A continuous increase in specification requirements combined with a continuous reduction in error tolerances for the manufactured solar cells means that process, automation and measurement systems often no longer fulfil this requirement very soon after they are put into operation. The industry is characterised by a large number of retrofitting projects.
To accelerate the amortisation of these systems, manufacturers need to have procedures in place to quickly put process, automation and measurement systems (move-in phase, ramp-up phase) into operation in production.
The problem:
the move-in and ramp-up phase is very time-consuming and costly without a plug-and-play principle for implementing new equipment and automation and measurement systems in an existing production.
The challenge:
a lack of industry standards leads to many of the equipment suppliers providing no or deficient interface components for the integration. These equipment suppliers focus their work on abiding by the process specification and less on digitally integrating the systems into the customer process. This rethink has not taken place to the necessary extent for all equipment suppliers.
Solution (Lean Design of Experiment, Lean MSA – measurement system analysis):
Management and controlling of projects in collaboration with Engineering, IT, Production, Maintenance and with the manufacturers of process, automation and measurement systems in order to standardise data integration.
Within the team, the data areas and the interface technology required for quick traceability of commissioning are standardised in collaboration with all of the participants. This data forms part of the standard system specification.
The specification takes into account the production processes wafer separation, wet chemical pre-treatment HF/HNO3, POCL (phosphorus-doped thermal diffusion), wet chemical edge isolation, plasma coating PECVD-Sin, printer, furnace, electroplating, cell tester.
A fast integration of data enables the specialist departments involved from Production (Line Optimisation, QA, Maintenance and Production Control) to quickly assess the integrated systems.
The Result
The time needed to optimally parameterise the systems and calibrate the measurement systems can be reduced in the ramp-up phase. The procedure has enabled us to reduce the ramp-up phase by up to 25%.
The experiment results required for optimal parametrisation can be evaluated more quickly. The same applies to the MSA to calibrate and commission measurement systems.
