High productivity in-line screen printing system for crystalline solar cell manufacturing
To develop a high performance in-line screen-printing system, the NPC Group defined an appropriate benchmark for characterizing the industrial efficiency of the operation and carried out a full analysis of the factors affecting this benchmark. A screen-printing system design based on careful cost analysis can produce a machine with a high effective throughput and low cell breakage. As a result, NPC is now offering advanced in-line, high precision systems to the photovoltaic industry. Future design changes results in machine speeds of 1,600 wafers per hour at a breakage below 0.5% for the three prints typical of the current cell manufacturing process.
Processing of crystalline silicon solar cells in high throughput production tools
The contribution of breakage-induced yield losses in solar cell and module manufacturing costs is well understood. Breakage data and information about the solutions implemented by cell manufacturers have a proprietary nature and are much less well known. The emergence of equipment manufacturers serving many customers is enabling solutions that are of common interest to the industry to become better known. In this paper we discuss the cell handling requirements of crystalline silicon solar cell manufacturers and present data obtained with two machines designed and manufactured by the NPC Group and used in cell testing and module assembly operations. On this basis, we propose topics where industry collaboration with the research community could result in advantages for all cell manufacturers.
The relation of food quantity to rumination behavior.
Preliminary work suggested that the quantity of food ingested by retarded individuals who usually ruminated following meals was related to the frequency and duration of ruminating responses. This possible relation was experimentally examined by systematically varying food quantity from regular portions to satiation levels for three retarded individuals who exhibited high levels of ruminating. A clear functional relation of food quantity to ruminating emerged, with satiation procedures producing rapid and large decreases in the relatively high frequencies and durations of ruminating characteristic of baseline food quantity conditions.