Recovery of metals from silicon based solar cells

摘要

INTRODUCTION Drastic global growth in photovoltaic (PV) panel installations gives rise to a new challenge for handling the huge amounts of waste that emerge as the panels are discarded after 25-30 years. The European WEEE directive set fundamental legal rules and obligation for collecting and recycling PV panels in the EU,1 however a large fraction of the metals and polymers are not recovered or recycled. Recovery of silver which is the most valuable material in silicon-based cells is interesting. We estimated that a single cell has approximately 0,3g silver from images of cross-sections, shown in Fig.1, by using a image analysis software ImageJ provided by National Institutes of Health (NIH) in USA.