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PES: Welcome back to PES SOLAR/PV magazine. Thanks for talking with us. Would you like to begin by explaining a little about the background of VITRONIC and the importance of the Solar/PV industry to you?

Bill Wang: VITRONIC is a leading company in industrial machine vision, based in Wiesbaden, Germany. Our subsidiary VITRONIC Machine Vision Shanghai was founded in 2013. Its main business scope is in sales and services, for applications in industrial, as well as logistics automation. With over 30 years of experience, we offer a

unique portfolio of systems and software for fully automated optical inspection solutions.

In the photovoltaic industry, our automatic machine vision systems are used by

well-known manufacturers throughout the world, and, in this way, are helping to drive the development of renewable energies.

Manufacturers of solar cells and modules around the world rely on our automated optical inspection systems that give them a competitive edge. We have a strong track record, with more than 2,000 successful PV installations for over 130 customers

Bill Wang, CEO VITRONIC, China, talks to PES about their development in Shanghai and the impact of systems and software for fully automated optical inspections and the impact this has on PV production cost.

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Cost reductions with optical systems

Bill Wang

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worldwide, which is based on over 10 years in photovoltaics.

PES: Are you experiencing growth in this market?

BW: The solar business is driven by clean energy policies and air pollution concerns worldwide. Accordingly, the global PV industry will continue its growth well into the future. In order to meet growing demand and competition, manufacturers will have to continue reducing production costs and cycle times – while simultaneously increasing product quality. And that is exactly where we can help our customers.

In future we will see even more growth in the PV market. At the same time, quality standards in the PV business are increasing, especially in meeting the requirements of international investors. But there is still a lot to be done. In the Chinese market, for example, automatic quality control is currently only applied at the very end of most PV production lines, by camera systems in the cell tester/sorter.

In the case of end-of-line testing, quality is only selected and not produced. Even there, you find big differences between simple and high performance solutions. However, to fulfil future quality requirements in the PV industry we see the necessity of inline Automated Optical Inspection (AOI), right at each surface and metallisation process.

PES: We have been hearing about your state of the art AOI in the Tester/Sorter solutions, please can you tell us what benefits this offers the customers?

BW: Our automated optical inspection solution in cell tester/sorter is already well established in the PV industry. It is used for sorting into colour classes, as well detecting corner and edge breakages, surface defects and doing a proper inspection with high pixel resolution.

There are two types of benefits. Firstly, we can ensure human-like colour classification by our systems. Secondly, our sophisticated inspection helps to reject cells that could cause later degradation e.g. cells with bad firing, bad metallisation, print interruptions, uneven coating, improper laser openings, missing rear side print, in addition to residues from chemicals.

Our high image performance is a result of optimised illumination distribution, intensity, homogeneity, light frequency range, filtering and other parameters.

PES: We understand that you have a sophisticated tester/sorter solution. But earlier you mentioned the value of inline inspection. Can you specify the gains it will bring to the customer in terms of quality control, efficiency and cost saving?

BW: VINSPEC SOLAR inline inspection covers every step of PV production

including cells, strings and modules. Our high performance camera systems are applied in coating and metallisation and in the tester/sorters in the cell production line, where we achieve significant improvements in yield and quality.

Trend analysis, evaluations from heat maps are implemented with VINSPEC SOLAR. Let me give you one example. Our post print inspection detects degradation in the printing equipment and by this means allows for quick reaction and tool changing. Together with short feedback loops we can improve the quality of each production step and by so reduce costs and optimise efficiency distribution.

Industry 4.0 features, like data correlation within and between production equipment, enable an ongoing optimisation of the production process. Results from recent data mining and evaluations from millions of cells, combined with comprehensive field experience, give us insights of how AOI can help to improve the quality of each production step.

Further benefits are the possibilities, which result out of our networked systems. For example a central recipe management across different sites, helps to minimise the risk of failure and saves time and manpower.

Everywhere the same recipes are available, changes are documented automatically, and individual versions can be locked or recommended for testing or production. All systems are calibrated exactly and all provide the same detection and classification performance to enable the very same quality across all lines.

PES: Why do you believe that these solutions will be important moving forward?

BW: As mentioned before, the increasing competitive pressure in PV production means higher levels of efficiency and quality in order to thrive and survive. We need to bear in mind that the upstream part of the PV value chain, plays an important role for improving the quality of PV components and installations.

With new production processes, PV wafer and cell manufacturers will contribute to increasing the durability and reliability of PV installations. Accordingly, only high performance automated optical inspection systems, which not only detect defects but also enable efficient production processes, can meet future demands.

We can help our customers to improve their yield and increase their efficiency. Therefore, it is safe to say that VINSPEC SOLAR inspection systems reduce costs per watt.

PES: Is this a system that you believe can help further strengthen VITRONIC’s position in the Chinese PV market?

BW: With more than ten years of experience in the PV business we have already built an excellent reputation in the Asian market. Leading PV manufacturers rely on our inspection systems, when implementing large scale projects.

For example there are more than 300 systems installed in Korea and 200 in Malaysia. Also in China we have delivered more than 100 systems, e.g. Tongwei China, who is one of our customers.

We are confident that increasing investor requirements can be guaranteed with our inline inspection and think that a growing number of Chinese manufactures will see the benefits of our solution as well.

PES: What is the single biggest challenge facing the market today?

BW: One of the biggest challenges in the PV business lies in its volatility. After booming years with steadily increasing investments in production and infrastructure, the PV manufacturing industry is now seeing a slight drop in finance volume.

On the other hand, the capacities have significantly increased in recent years. According to many studies the installed solar power will have increased tenfold by 2030.

What does this mean for PV production? To put it in a nutshell – reliable high quality and optimised processes.

www.vitronic.de

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