How to treat the cells of photovoltaic panels?

1. Physical treatment

Separation of materials

Physical methods, such as mechanical crushing and screening, are utilized to further break down the cell wafers into smaller pieces, thereby separating different materials such as silicon wafers, silver paste, copper foil, and so on. For example, by means of fine crushing equipment, the cell wafers are crushed into suitable particle sizes, and then the density differences between the different materials are utilized to separate them by means of airflow sorting or liquid sorting.

For silicon wafers, they can be cleaned and reused as raw materials in the photovoltaic industry. Some high-quality recycled silicon wafers can be purified and processed to be made into photovoltaic cells again, which reduces the reliance on virgin silicon materials to a certain extent.

Direct reuse

If the integrity of the cell wafers is good, some of them can be directly reused in some application scenarios that require relatively low cell performance. For example, they are used to make small solar chargers, solar street lights, etc. These application scenarios do not require as high a conversion efficiency for the cells as large-scale photovoltaic power plants.

2. Chemical Processing

Metal Recovery

Precious metals in battery cells can be recovered by chemical leaching. For example, silver paste in the battery cell is dissolved using acid or alkali solution to dissolve silver ions into the solution, and then the silver is recovered through precipitation, electrolysis and other methods. For metal materials such as copper foil, similar chemical methods can be used to recover them and process them into metal raw materials for use in other industries.

For silicon materials, chemical methods can also be used for purification. Some recycled silicon materials may contain impurities that can be chemically purified to a higher purity for better reuse in the manufacture of photovoltaic cells.

Material Regeneration

Chemical synthesis methods are used to re-synthesize recycled materials into raw materials for PV cell manufacturing. For example, recycled silicon and other additives undergo a series of chemical processes to re-generate silicon raw materials that can be used for crystal pulling or ingot casting, thus realizing material recycling.

Recycling of photovoltaic panels and cells not only reduces production costs and the exploitation of virgin resources, but also reduces the potential environmental pollution caused by discarded photovoltaic modules, which is an important part of the sustainable development of the photovoltaic industry.