Precise glueing of silicon bricks onto wire-saw beams is of high significance for wafer production. Only a constantly reproducible and durable adhesive bonded joint guarantees a high cutting yield in the later wafer cutting process. Arnold specialists are demonstrating the automated brick glueing process in their technology centre in Weilburg/Germany at a specially installed pilot production system for customised glueing process development. Individual appointments for interested customers are possible any time.
Arnold is a well-known automation specialist for the automotive- and photovoltaic industry with comprehensive know-how for the overall optimization of the individual process steps of brick manufacturing starting with cropping, grinding up to the automated brick glueing process. Depending on the customers requirements Arnold is offering a complete product line of automated glueing systems. Those are based on an industrial robot system with high accuracy as well as a highly precise adhesive dosing system for reproducible adhesive beads.
Depending on the complexity and customer requirements, the basic system is completed with an automated cleaning unit, a brick commissioning storage for optimization of wire saw utilization and a storage unit for resting of glued bricks during curing. The system also allows the automation of the joining process of bricks with glass plate and wire saw beam.
With the new developed software tool AEPS (Arnold Easy Programming System) customers own system-supervisors and process technicians are now in the position to create and edit movement and process programs in an admissible range by themselves without expert programming knowledge of the individual system components. This is a unique tool to optimize the characteristic of glueing beads like robot velocity during the application or gluing bead thickness. Simply and safely by just selecting the required position at the central touchscreen, process or movement date can be added, deleted, moved or edited.
No further expert knowledge in robot/SPS-programming is required. Process- and production data are collected by means of Arpat (Arnold Process Analysis Tool) in real time, visualized, analyzed and recorded. Within a closed loop the operator is in the position to react very fast and any time on each change in basic conditions such as aging of adhesives, glueing batch related material changes etc. without requiring the assistance of expensive programming specialists.
About 90 percent of all glueing works are still done manually in the photovoltaic industry and hence are very dependent on the skills of the individual worker. With an automated process the consumption of glueing material can be typically reduced by approximately 50 percent compared with the manual process. An automation of glueing process will reduce the breakage rate during wafering in the later wire sawing process by at least two percent and all this means a considerable reduction of production costs.
To fix an appointment for an individual demonstration of the installed glueing system at the Arnold premises please contact the company directly – person in charge: Peter Weier, Head of Business Unit Silicon Processing Machinery, phone: +49 6471-9394-26.
