Recovery of Silicon Wafers from End-of-Life Silicon-Based Solar Cells for Alternative Photovoltaic Applications.

As the world is switching toward renewable energy, solar energy always appears to be the first topic for discussion. Solar power plant installation grows extremely fast globally, almost exponentially each year, resulting in massive amounts of waste from the end-of-life modules. There is currently no ideal technology to recycle such a complete module back into use, however, researchers have proposed many methods to recycle usable materials. Silicon is one of the valuable materials in solar cells which is worth recovering. The silicon wafers from the end-of-life cells were recovered using an etching method. The properties of the obtained wafers were investigated whether they are matching enough for the perovskite solar cell applications.