Ines and Mondragon Assembly have developed a pre-lamination system that creates prefabricated photovoltaic cores for integration into customized products, including electric mobility components and building facades.
France’s National Solar Energy Institute (INES) – a division of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) – and Spanish PV production equipment provider Mondragon have unveiled a new industrial tool designed to integrate photovoltaic technology into non-standardized products, including components for electric mobility and building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV).
The partners’ new approach focuses on manufacturing the “core” of a photovoltaic module as a standalone prefabricated component that can later be incorporated into a wide range of products through different industrial processes.
To enable this, the two organizations developed a “pre-laminator” capable of assembling solar cells into an intermediate product – the photovoltaic core of a future module – before it is integrated by another manufacturer into a final application. The resulting component can then be incorporated using conventional flat lamination processes or alternative techniques such as 3D lamination, molding, or overmolding.
