Laser Recycling of Silver from Waste Silicon Solar Cells

Recycling PV modules is highly important as total solar waste is expected to grow to tens of millions of tons. The economic management of solar waste is essential as they are currently discarded in landfills. Silver is one of the high-cost items in solar modules, and chemical methods for recovery have been investigated. This work demonstrates the recovery of silver using a laser ablation process in air and in a water medium. The laser ablation in a water environment allows for obtaining silver in nanoparticle form. The results of laser silver recovery in air and water are presented. The morphology and composition of the collected silver particles were analyzed using SEM and EDS techniques. The effect of laser power, scan speed, wavelength, and the pulse width was investigated in terms of the evaluation of throughput and purity of the laser-generated micro and nanoparticles. We have successfully demonstrated laser ablation as a viable method for the recovery of silver from waste solar cells.