Sustainable Mining and Metallurgy

As a green and efficient energy conversion medium, solar cells have been widely used in the world in recent years. With the rapid development of the photovoltaic industry, the number of retired photovoltaic modules is increasing. How to efficiently recycle and utilize retired photovoltaic modules has become an important issue for the photovoltaic industry. Based on the introduction of the structure and composition of crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules, this paper briefly described the characteristics of the main methods of resource recovery of decommissioned photovoltaic modules, and summarized the application research progress of silicon materials recovered from decommissioned photovoltaic modules in the fields of silicon wafer repair and regeneration, silicon powder regeneration to manufacture silicon anode materials, and silicon powder application in silicon alloys at home and abroad, in order to provide ideas for finding an economical, efficient and clean silicon material recovery method for retired photovoltaic modules.