120 Years of DECKER Anlagenbau GmbH: From Foundries to PV High-Tech System Manufacturers

120 years at the top. How did we get there? For this many years, DECKER Anlagenbau GmbH has managed to correctly assess technological developments and gear the company toward the current needs of the industry. Today the company builds silicon recycling systems for the photovoltaic industry, and once again has its finger on the pulse of time. Where once iron and steel was cast, now customized units are built for wet chemical surface treatment. The company’s history reads like a journey through the industry’s history.

Brilliant ideas do not fall from the trees like apples. DECKER has grown with its customers and their needs, and has always adapted internal structures to the demands of the market. The former foundry operation developed into a plant manufacturer in the early ’60s. DECKER systems are used wherever parts have to be anodized, gun-metal finished, chromated or phosphated in the metal industry. The engineer Hans Schnyder has ensured continuity in the midst of change for 50 years. He and his long-standing manager, Manfred Götz, have constantly looked for new markets and have oriented themselves toward the development of their major customers, including large companies such as Siemens and Wacker. In this way, the company has been active early on in the construction of silicon cleaning systems for the semiconductor industry. In 2000, DECKER began high-tech development of a contactless bearing based on high-temperature superconductors for the IT industry.

DECKER’s entry into the burgeoning photovoltaic industry a few years ago fits this picture. Under the new managing director, Kay Rehberg, the company developed a recycling plant that paved the way for economic silicon recycling on an industrial scale. The decades of experience in wet chemical surface treatment could be built upon this. Early on, the company occupied a future market in which large photovoltaic systems had to be efficiently disposed of. For this reason, the company is particularly proud of the innovation prize that the system was awarded at this year’s Intersolar Europe. And so the commitment to new ideas has brought about another success story – a story that has just begun.

Today when you look at the customized high-tech products of DECKER, it is hard to imagine that the history of the company began in 1891 when two brothers bought a foundry and produced cast semi-finished products as contract work. There was nothing to indicate that a solid basic turnover was to be secured with park benches – until a new chapter in the company history was opened with plastic apparatus construction in the early ’60s.

When Hans Schnyder became manager and technical director of the company in the ’50s, the metalworking industry was at its peak. However, Schnyder the engineer thought ahead and focused on new processing technologies. He invested in an innovative pickling plant for the surface treatment of metals, and so early on the company could establish its skills finishing surfaces. In the ’70s came the development of silicon etching equipment for the emerging semiconductor industry.

Much later, the company ventured on the long-term coordinated project to develop a contactless bearing for the IT industry. Unlike other companies, DECKER based the system on high-temperature superconductor technology. Great reorientations on such a big scale require courage and ingenuity. Both were probably handed down in the cradle to Mr. Schnyder – now more than 80 years old – by his father. He was the one who built the ignition mechanism with which the aviation pioneer, Charles Lindbergh, piloted his plane safely across the Atlantic. It is not surprising that Schnyder says: “At the top of a company, technicians are in the best position to distinguish between good and not-so-good solutions and convincingly sell them.” Schnyder sees the main task of successful business management in the close monitoring of technological change and the wise assessment of the potential of new technologies.
The Fuchs family, who acquired the company in 2004, is well prepared for the future, thanks to the wide lineup: through its involvement in the photovoltaic industry, as a key pillar of future energy supply as well as with applications for the metalworking industry and the electronics industry that continue to play an important role. Today the growing international markets play a major role for the company. As a buyer, China is the largest and most important market for DECKER.

As a result of the experiences with systems for silicon cleaning in the semiconductor industry gained in the ’70s, the jump to reprocessing silicon for the photovoltaic sector was well prepared.

Valuable scrap accrues in different stages of the production process when manufacturing solar cells; this scrap can be reused if the right recycling technology is utilized. This will become increasingly important due to growing production numbers as well as rising spot prices. A further market segment is also the recycling of old solar plants, which promises to be an area with rapid growth for the future.

However, the cleaning of small parts or of granulate is a tremendous technical challenge for the solar energy sector due to the large surface area and the required degree of cleanness. DECKER Anlagenbau GmbH has developed a groundbreaking solution for these problems: an innovative etching system enabling the cost-efficient integration of silicon cleaning into the production line.

DECKER Belt Filter:
High Throughput at Low Costs

For this reason, DECKER has moved the cleaning process to a conveyor belt. DECKER’s belt filter is unique, saving up to 50 percent in cost as well as time and protects the environment. Cleaning the production scrap in large-scale production settings is only possible with this technology. Standard cleaning methods are reaching their limits in this setting since they drastically reduce the production throughput. In comparison, the typical scale for the throughput of a DECKER belt filter is about 1,000 tons per year.

The DECKER belt filters are the ideal alternative to existing cleaning methods, which use standard product carriers such as barrels or baskets. Quality problems, in addition to time and cost factors, are inherent to the system since the etching processes take longer inside the baskets than they do on the surface. Costs for the DECKER belt filters depend on different parameters; return on investment within one year can be realized under certain conditions.

Fast Cleaning Down to the ppbw Zone
Cleaning silicon surfaces is a complex matter. There are many possible contaminations, ranging from fingerprints to metallic residues that arise during the milling and transport processes. Cleaning the relatively large surface becomes a challenge for grain sizes ranging from 100 micrometers to 4 millimeters. DECKER belt filters completely remove all contamination to the required level that is within the ppbw zone (ppbw = parts per billion by weight). At the moment, the required average surface quality for high-quality polysilicon granulate is at a value of less than 15 ppbw for metals such as iron. Metal contamination reduces the efficiency of solar cells.

The efficiency of solar cells is mainly determined by the cleanness of the silicon. The market increasingly demands a silicon granulate with a high degree of surface cleanness. Valuable solar silicon is accrued as waste or scrap in different forms (powder, granulate, lumps, wafer) during the production of solar wafers in almost every step of the production process. This can be reused in the production of silicon ingots. DECKER’s silicon granulate etching system enables manufacturers to recycle solar silicon quickly and cost-efficiently.

In addition to the award-winning band filter, DECKER is already developing new ideas for the PV industry. A project to optimize the crystallization crucible for ingot production is already in the advanced stages.

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