Production of high purity glass from wasted photovoltaic panels by electrical disintegration

This paper describes the possibility to produce high purity glass from PV panels. Recently, Photovoltaic (PV) power system has been widely used in the world, and the wasted PV panels are also estimated to be increased rapidly in the near future. Glass components usually compose about 70 % of PV panel in its weight, so, recycling process for glass should be developed as soon as possible. However, no technology has been developed that could produce high purity glass with a high capacity. This is because the glass material recovered from PV panel usually adheres to ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) strongly, and it is difficult to remove it. Then, we developed a novel process in order to solve the above problems by applying electrical disintegration (ED) to the glass pre-concentrated products, containing EVA, produced in a large-scale shredder plant with shredding and sorting facilities. As a result, the ED could make a selective breakage at the boundary of glass/EVA and of glass material itself with small energy and glass components showed a tendency to be concentrated in finer size fractions and EVA remained in coarser size fractions. In this study, we determined the optimum ED conditions and considered the mechanism of the ED phenomena based on the results.