It is always fascinating to see technology crossovers. It’s surprising how often another industry has solved the problems facing your industry. Here we have a classic case of a company founded on wood lamination applying its technology to solar modules.

Bürkle North America, Inc., is a subsidiary company of Robert Bürkle GmbH, having its headquarters in Garden Grove, California. Bürkle is focused on two core technologies, coating and lamination, and serves the woodworking industry, the printed wiring board fabrication industry, the photovoltaic solar panel industry, and the plastic card fabrication industry. Bürkle is the pioneer in supplying multi-opening lamination lines into the PV Industry. More than 35 multi-opening lamination lines for the lamination of solar modules have been supplied since the market entry in 2008. Bürkle is a 90-year-old company with three manufacturing facilities in Germany and sales and service offices around the world. The group has a staff of 720 employees.

The multi-daylight Ypsator®

I talked to Dick Crowe, president and CEO of Bürkle North America, (who had interviewed me at APEX). I was fascinated by the way this company had carved out a really interesting niche in the market.

How did this business evolve?
Starting with wood lamination 91 years ago, we devised large-area, high-precision laminating processes that were later used in circuit board manufacture, credit card lamination and solar modules.

What is your technical emphasis?
Precise materials handling and thermal uniformity across the heated platen using oil heating.

How did you get into solar PV?
About 10 years ago we looked at the market, and at that time it was too small and not well enough developed for us. We revisited with an extensive market survey and decided that the time was now right to introduce lamination products that would yield statistically significant yield and throughput improvements.

How do you achieve these improvements?
It’s critical to manage pressure and heat uniformity over time. Our vacuum presses using membranes give uniform pressure without cracking the solar modules.

What types of presses do you sell?
“Single Daylight” (easy-Lam®) and “Multi Daylight” (Ypsator®). The single units have a cycle time of 17-20 minutes. Our multi units with four to 10 openings can increase throughput in proportion with the number of parallel stacked platens—up to 240 panels per hour depending on size.

How can you reduce cycle time?
We have a split cycle process that can further increase throughput by reducing the cycle time to 8-10 minutes, a reduction of 50%. The first part of the cycle applies vacuum, heat and pressure to start polymerization, and the polymerization is finished under pressure and heat with no vacuum. This can give an output of up to 144 panels per hour.

You mentioned materials handling as a strength?
We manage this within the laminators to minimize productive time. One load is ready to move as soon as the earlier load exits the process.

What’s next for Bürkle?
We are driven by the industry roadmaps and the development of local module manufacturing across the world. Silicon based systems will dominate (although we see significant developments from our thin film customers, especially CIGS), and so we feel we are well positioned for the next five years’ growth. We have shipped over 150 machines, and demand is strong. We have worldwide manufacturing and distribution, with, for example, six service engineers in North America.

We have other product lines we will bring on as needed, for example our easy-Coater® novel glass coating system using a combination of grooved and solid pressure rollers to give an extremely uniform coating on glass across the entire width, something which is not possible to achieve with other technologies, such as spray. This technology is adaptable to a wide range of glass coatings for imaging, adhesion, optical modification, etc., for both thin film and crystalline silicon modules.

Single-daylight easy-Lam®

Bürkle shows nicely how a best-of breed supplier can develop a strong business in the growing solar PV market by bringing in the right products at the right time.