DEK Solar continues to win global recognition with second consecutive Solar Industry Award

The SOLAR Award for Excellence is for the product, group and person whom the SOLAR Awards judges felt reflect technical excellence and through proven capability have the potential to be the industry gold standard. The judges cross the whole PV value chain and work for the industry in R&D, manufacturing and systems integration.

The Solar Industry Award was collected by DEK Solar Alternative Energy Business Manager, Darren Brown, at a ceremony held on September 7th at the luxurious Hotel Balneario Los Arenas resort. The award is particularly special for the company, as Darren explains: “We’re delighted to win another Solar Industry Award. Collecting the trophy for the second year running is fantastic since it highlights the continual innovation taking place here at DEK Solar. Last year, we were recognised for our highly flexible PV1200 metallization line, a technology that we built on with the launch of the PV3000 – a high throughput metallization platform recognised by the 2010 award programme. But we don’t stand still for long! We’ve already eclipsed this technology – literally – with the launch of Eclipse, our pioneering new metallization solution offering our customers a highly scalable production advantage.”
‘The Solar Industry Awards’ continue to promote the people, process and places that make up the global PV and solar industry,’ said David Ridsdale, Editor in Chief of Solar, PV Management. ‘. The companies, people and products are selected due to the confidence of the global solar and PV community.’
Launched at the EU PVSEC exhibition, DEK Solar’s new Eclipse platform is a very high throughput metallization technology. Based around a new modular design concept, Eclipse incorporates a series of field retrofittable process modules that enable manufacturers to easily scale production up and down, to 1200, 2400 or 3600 wph. The primary process modules, including the print head and loader, incorporate master controls, meaning that additional process modules operate as secondary “slaves” to remove the cost of further control units. Eclipse performance can be easily upgraded in the field for manufacturers who forsee a production ramp up. Spacer process modules can be deployed at initial installation, then simply exchanged for additional print capacity when demand dictates. This eliminates the need to reconfigure the entire line to accomodate extra modules to streamline scalability even further.

Having been active in solar cell manufacturing for over 30 years, DEK Solar attributes its continued product innovation to its unique background in the sector. The company’s solar expertise extends back to photovoltaic thick film technology. The screen printing processes it deploys today in its metallization solutions were refined in demanding semiconductor packaging applications. As a consequence, DEK Solar’s process knowledge and applications expertise is delivered by an extensive global logistics and support network. This foundation delivers leading-edge resources from process and service support, to 24/7 spare parts availability. In addition, dedicated worldwide technical centres in China, Germany, the UK and USA put hundreds of highly trained product and process specialists within close reach of DEK customers around the world.