Thermal delamination of end-of-life crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules

Abstract

Thermal delamination – meaning the removal of polymers from the module structure by a thermal process – as a first step in the recycling of crystalline silicon (c-Si) photovoltaic (PV) modules in order to enable the subsequent recovery of secondary raw materials was investigated. A correlation between treatment temperature and duration was established by an iterative process. Furthermore, chemical characterization of the resulting solid outputs (glass, cell, ribbons and residues) was performed in order to assess their further processing options. Additionally, the effect of removing the backsheet as a pre-treatment before the actual delamination process was investigated in relation to the aforementioned aspects of treatment duration and output quality. Results show that increased temperatures reduce the necessary treatment duration (65 minutes at 500°C, 33 minutes at 600°C) while generating the same output quality. The backsheet removal leads to an additional duration decrease of more than 45% at each considered temperature, while also having positive effects relating to fewer solid residues and easier flue gas handling. In regard to the main output specifications no significant influence of the pre-treatment is observed. Overall thermal delamination can be seen as a feasible method in order to obtain high value secondary raw materials from c-Si PV modules, while backsheet removal as pre-treatment should be considered as advantageous from multiple standpoints.

Advancing sustainable end-of-life strategies for photovoltaic modules with silicon reclamation for lithium-ion battery anodes

“…On the other hand, thermal treatments involve heating the panels in an oven for a specific duration. 16 Upon completion, the encapsulant, copper wire ribbons, and the actual cell can be separated and processed. 16 Although thermal methods prove to be more economically viable and safer when executed correctly, they have a high energy cost 17 and produce CO 2 emissions 18 and may result in harmful gas generation because of the decomposition of the back sheet.…”

“…16 Upon completion, the encapsulant, copper wire ribbons, and the actual cell can be separated and processed. 16 Although thermal methods prove to be more economically viable and safer when executed correctly, they have a high energy cost 17 and produce CO 2 emissions 18 and may result in harmful gas generation because of the decomposition of the back sheet. 19 Dobra et al 16 claimed that it took only 33 minutes to remove EVA at 600 °C.…”

“…16 Although thermal methods prove to be more economically viable and safer when executed correctly, they have a high energy cost 17 and produce CO 2 emissions 18 and may result in harmful gas generation because of the decomposition of the back sheet. 19 Dobra et al 16 claimed that it took only 33 minutes to remove EVA at 600 °C. Fiandra et al 20 removed EVA after milling off the back sheet at 500 °C for 1 h. In addition, based on thermal treatment, researchers developed many interesting but efficient processes.…”

An Effective Evaluation on Fault Detection in Solar Panels

“…Deep residual neural network [27] Mini-grid/large grid Online Acoustic wave method [28] Mini-grid/large grid Online Imaging technique [29] Mini-grid/large grid Offline Weather Inverse distance weighting [30] Home/mini-grid/large grid Online Data analytics [31] Home/mini-grid/large grid Online Theta-krill herd algorithm [32] Home/mini-grid/large grid Online Delamination Electric discharge channel [33] Mini-grid/large grid Online Thermal imaging [34] Mini/large grid Offline Aging test [35] Mini/large grid Offline Discoloration I-V characteristic analysis [36] Mini/large grid Offline Accelerated testing (AT) [37] Mini-grid/large grid Online Spectroscopic investigation [38] Mini-grid/large grid Offline…”

Circular solar: Evaluating the profitability of a photovoltaic panel recycling plant

“…Several works highlights the relevance of the topic (Chatziparaskeva et al, 2022; Papamichael et al, 2022a) and the need to conduct economic analyses (Rathore and Panwar, 2021) aiming to reach circular economy goals (Papamichael and Zorpas, 2022b). The approach to be used is to propose technical evaluations (Dobra et al, 2021) to be applied to established economic models of analysis (D’Adamo et al, 2017). This work will assess the profitability of a polycrystalline PV module recycling plant by evaluating different market contexts in which multiple scenarios of material price, investment and process costs will be considered and finally the analysis will also address the relevance of the avoided landfill cost.…”