Recovery of Pure Silicon and Other Materials from Disposed Solar Cells

Abstract

The disposal of used photovoltaic panels is increasing day by day around the world. Therefore, an efficient method for recycling disposed photovoltaic panel is required to decrease environmental pollution. This work is aimed at efficiently recovering pure silicon and other materials such as aluminium, silver, and lead from disposed solar cells using chemical treatments. Earlier, the pure silicon was recovered by treating the solar cells with hydrofluoric acid or mixture of hydrofluoric acid and other chemicals. The usage of hydrofluoric acid is eliminated in the present work as it is highly toxic and corrosive chemical. The pure silicon (99.9984%) has been recovered by sequentially treating with three different chemicals. Aluminium, silver, and lead are also recovered as aluminium hydroxide, silver chloride, and lead oxide, respectively.

The dawn of MXene duo: revolutionizing perovskite solar cells with MXenes through computational and experimental methods

“…These cells have power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) above 26% and an average panel lifespan of 25 years. [1][2][3] Out of all the new photovoltaic (PV) technologies, Perovskite Solar Cells (PSCs) are the most practical alternative since they provide a Power Conversion Efficiency (PCE) similar to that of well-established silicon solar cells. Furthermore, the advantages of these materials include their affordability, ability to adjust the energy gap, ease of processing at low temperatures, low-exciton binding energy, high light absorption coefficient, long carrier diffusion lengths, compositional tuning, and facile solutionprocessing techniques for mass production.…”

Recovery of Silicon Wafers from End-of-Life Silicon-Based Solar Cells

“…As a result, plenty amount of usable materials from the modules will be wasted in the end. To enhance sustainable waste management and low-cost development, researchers have come up with ideas to recover those reusable materials, especially silicon wafers, from the EoL panels back to use [6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

“…In addition, the energy consumption of silicon wafers manufacturing is extremely high compared to other materials [8]. In terms of properties, several researchers claim that the recovered silicon wafers have identical properties (both physical and chemical) to those virgin-commercial wafers and can also be reused in new cell production or even other applications [8][9][10]. For these reasons, silicon wafers have the potential to be recovered and reused.…”

“…As the result, pure silicon wafers with a thickness of more than 180 µm were recycled and those cells fabricated using recycled wafers had equivalent efficiency to the virgin cells [10]. Lately, in April 2021, Punathil et al, [9] have published new methods for the recovery of pure silicon and other materials from the EoL solar cells and claimed that their work can extract pure silicon at a percentage of 99.9984%. They eliminated HF solution due to its highly toxic and corrosive chemical.…”

A Study on the Recovery of Valuable Metals from Solar Cells Using Acid Leaching and Substitution Reactions

“…The solar power generation market has been growing rapidly worldwide over the past few years due to increased energy demand, expanded government support, increased interest in environmental pollution, etc., and solar module installations are increasing exponentially in line with this trend [1,2]. As of 2019, the cumulative solar cell installation worldwide exceeds 500 GW, and the total cumulative installation volume is expected to exceed TW by 2023 [3,4].…”