According to reports, this technology can provide recycled silicon with a purity of up to 99.9984%.
Scientists from the KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology in India have developed a new technology that can recover pure silicon at the end of the solar cell's life cycle.
Unlike other traditional methods of recycling silicon from photovoltaic equipment, this new technology is not based on the use of the highly toxic chemical hydrofluoric acid, which is commonly used in the photovoltaic industry for quartz cleaning and wafer etching. In the recycling of solar modules, corrosive acids separate the silicon from the battery by removing anti-reflective coatings, silver, lead, and pn junctions.
The Indian group replaced the corrosive acid with three different chemicals: a 10 M sodium hydroxide (NaOH) solution was applied to the aluminum layer at 63 degrees Celsius for 5 minutes; a 6 M nitric acid (HNO3) solution was used to remove the silver electrode and lead ; Use 90% phosphoric acid solution to remove the anti-reflective coating based on silicon nitride (Si3NA4) at 70 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes.
The external components of solar panels, such as glass, ethylene-vinyl acetate glass, copper, steel, aluminum, and plastic, have previously been removed by thermal degradation.
According to scientists, the proposed technology can provide recycled silicon with a purity of up to 99.9984%. The cost of using this process to recover 1 kg of solar cells is estimated to be US$68.9, and the total profit after 1 kg of solar cells is calculated to be US$185.4. They explained that the recycled silicon can be used to make new solar cells or electronic components such as diodes, transistors and microchips.
It is said that this recycling technology can also recover aluminum, silver and lead in the form of aluminum hydroxide, silver chloride and lead oxide, respectively. This is described in the paper "Recovery of Pure Silicon and Other Materials from Disposed Solar Cells" published in the International Journal of Light Energy.
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