Sustainable Recycling of Selenium-Based Optoelectronic Devices.
Adv Sci (Weinh)
; 11(22): e2400615, 2024 Jun.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38489666
ABSTRACT
Selenium (Se), the world's oldest optoelectronic material, has been widely applied in various optoelectronic devices such as commercial X-ray flat-panel detectors and photovoltaics. However, despite the rare and widely-dispersed nature of Se element, a sustainable recycling of Se and other valuable materials from spent Se-based devices has not been developed so far. Here a sustainable strategy is reported that makes use of the significantly higher vapor pressure of volatile Se compared to other functional layers to recycle all of them from end-of-life Se-based devices through a closed-space evaporation process, utilizing Se photovoltaic devices as a case study. This strategy results in high recycling yields of ≈ 98% for Se and 100% for other functional materials including valuable gold electrodes and glass/FTO/TiO2 substrates. The refabricated photovoltaic devices based on these recycled materials achieve an efficiency of 12.33% under 1000-lux indoor illumination, comparable to devices fabricated using commercially sourced materials and surpassing the current indoor photovoltaic industry standard of amorphous silicon cells.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Language:
En
Journal:
Adv Sci (Weinh)
Year:
2024
Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
China