Solar PV – High Speed Cell Binning

The Situation

As a leading cell manufacturers line throughput requirements continued to increase, the load and unload requirements for their PV inspection tools became more stringent. Higher throughputs require greater capacity and faster cycle-time, yet increasing yield demands gentle handling. Unique cell characteristics required innovative handling approach.

The Challenge

Achieving the target cost of ownership required a line throughput of 7200 cells per hour. Given the high throughput, fully automated cassette exchange to interface to factory automation was needed. Every cell and cassette must be individually tracked using RFID and barcodes.

The Solution

Owens worked closely with the customer to architect an automation solution to meet the unique handling requirements while still achieving 7200 cells per hour. The fully custom solution utilized a delta style robot for rapid cell transfer, multiple machi