Recycling of critical and strategic metals from solar cells

Research Project, 2024 – 2026

Solar energy harvesting capacity has been increasing to reach the green energy transition goals and to supply sustainable energy all around the world. However, increasing solar cell manufacturing and implementation bring a problem which is the growing end-of-life (EoL) and manufacturing waste. Besides critical and strategic metals/materials, such as silver, indium, copper, molybdenum, tungsten etc., are used in the solar cell that makes the solar cell industry vulnerable. Due to the feasibility and technology limitations, these metals are lost in current waste management sytsem and the industrial recycling of the solar cells/modules focuses on simply separatable high volume/mass parts like aluminum frame, glass and organics. Hydrometallurgical processing approaches has been investigated to develop to relable process that our group came up with a solution to reduce the chemical comsumption in metal extraction from solar cells to reduce the processing cost. This project aims to validate single step electrochemical processing for the metal recovery from thin film solar cells. Moreover, selective metal extraction and purification by precipitation will be investigated to develop an alternative recycling approach.