Don’t Let Lasers Ruin Your Solar Cells!

Picture this: After decades of providing the best quality solar panels, you find competitors edging you out of the market with a better profit margin. They’re using the new laser scribing process to produce solar cells more efficiently. At first, you want to stick with the tried and true methods, but at a certain point you’re left with no choice. So, you hop on the bandwagon and get a laser scribing system. This should put my competitors back in their place, you think. But, no! The laser system is not providing the same quality solar cells your customers have grown to expect from you.

How can this be?

Laser scribing is a great way to produce more solar cells faster. But what about the quality of these cells? Are we just sacrificing standards for time? Laser technology is actually very exact and repeatable. However, lasers must be monitored to ensure they continue to function at this level. As long as we can be assured that the laser is continuing to operate at the correct power and beam size and shape, we can rest easy knowing that our laser is providing fast, quality work.

It is important for the laser beam to have the right amount of energy and the optimal size and shape for two reasons:

1. If any residual material is not ablated by the laser, there can be short circuits between subpanels. This would result in scrapping the entire solar panel.
2. The perfect size and shape of a laser beam can increase the usable area of the solar panel.

To this end, Ophir Photonics has two solutions:

1. Our Pyro-C line of pyroelectric energy sensors measures the energy per pulse so you can be sure your laser scriber is providing the correct amount of energy.

2.  Spiricon’s line of CCD cameras is perfect for gaining an in-depth profile of your laser beam.  This reveals many characteristics of your laser, including beam width, shape and size.

Here’s a great example of how these simple steps can help maintain solar cell production efficiency.

Don’t wait until your lasers start to malfunction.  Use laser beam profiling to save your solar cells today!

Do you use laser scribing?  What has your experience been?  Let us know in the comments.

You might also like to read: Laser beam profiling- a key for “solar revolution”