Research Article Recovery of Pure Silicon and Other Materials from Disposed Solar Cells Lineesh Punathil , 1 K. Mohanasundaram, 2 K. S. Tamilselavan, 3 Ravishankar Sathyamurthy , 4 and Ali J. Chamkha 5,6 1 Department of Chemical Engineering, KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore 641407, India 2 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore 641407, India 3 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore 641407, India 4 Department of Mechanical Engineering, KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore 641407, India 5 Faculty of Engineering, Kuwait College of Science and Technology, Doha, Kuwait 6 Institute of Research and Development, Duy Tan University, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam Correspondence should be addressed to Lineesh Punathil; lineesh.p@kpriet.ac.in and Ali J. Chamkha; alichamkha@duytan.edu.vn Received 19 January 2021; Revised 8 March 2021; Accepted 4 April 2021; Published 16 April 2021 Academic Editor: Joaquim Carneiro Copyright © 2021 Lineesh Punathil et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The disposal of used photovoltaic panels is increasing day by day around the world. Therefore, an efficient method for recycling disposed photovoltaic panel is required to decrease environmental pollution. This work is aimed at efficiently recovering pure silicon and other materials such as aluminium, silver, and lead from disposed solar cells using chemical treatments. Earlier, the pure silicon was recovered by treating the solar cells with hydrofluoric acid or mixture of hydrofluoric acid and other chemicals. The usage of hydrofluoric acid is eliminated in the present work as it is highly toxic and corrosive chemical. The pure silicon (99.9984%) has been recovered by sequentially treating with three different chemicals. Aluminium, silver, and lead are also recovered as aluminium hydroxide, silver chloride, and lead oxide, respectively. 1. Introduction The use of solar cells has been tremendously growing around the world as it is a nonpolluting device for power generation. In contrary, the quantity of end-of-life of solar cells and dam- aged solar cells is drastically increased [1]. The average life expectancy of solar panel is about 25-30 years. In worldwide, around 60 million tons of solar panels have become wastes as those are in the stage of end-of-life [2]. Therefore, an efficient method for recycling of disposed solar cells is a necessity as it causes serious environmental pollution. A few works have carried out for recycling of photovol- taic panels by using various methods [3–9]. Doi et al. [3] have recovered solar cells from EVA laminated solar cells by disso- lution method. Later, it is found that thermal treatment is more economical to remove EVA from solar cells [4, 5]. Fur- ther, dissolution of EVA of solar cells in various solvents with ultrasonic irradiation has been analyzed by Kim and Lee. [6]. Dias et al. [7] have used chemical and thermal treatments to separate silver from the disposed solar cells. To extract pure silicon from the solar cell, various chem- ical treatments have been used [4, 5, 8]. Hydrofluoric acid was the most common chemical used for separating silicon from the solar cell [4, 5]. However, the usage of hydrofluoric acid has to be eliminated as it is a highly toxic and corrosive chemical. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to replace hydrofluoric acid with other chemicals and efficiently recover pure silicon from the disposed solar cells. In addition, the other materials present in the solar cells such as alumin- ium, silver, and lead have to be recovered. Hindawi International Journal of Photoenergy Volume 2021, Article ID 5530213, 4 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5530213