Restoring the Reactivity of Organic Acid Solution Used for Silver Recovery from Solar Cells by Fractional Distillation

Jun-Kyu Lee, Jin-Seok Lee, Young-Soo Ahn and Gi-Hwan Kang
Additional contact information
Jun-Kyu Lee: Separation and Conversion Materials Laboratory, Korea Institute of Energy Research, Daejeon 34129, Korea
Jin-Seok Lee: Separation and Conversion Materials Laboratory, Korea Institute of Energy Research, Daejeon 34129, Korea
Young-Soo Ahn: Separation and Conversion Materials Laboratory, Korea Institute of Energy Research, Daejeon 34129, Korea
Gi-Hwan Kang: Photovoltaic Laboratory, Korea Institute of Energy Research, Daejeon 34129, Korea

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 13, 1-9

Abstract: Methanesulfonic acid (MSA) is used to recover silver (Ag) from solar cells by adding an oxidizing agent. It is possible to regenerate by substituting of H + for Ag + , and thus it can be reused for additional reactions. However, MSA is highly hygroscopic, and as an oxidizing agent can easily decompose in the acidic environment during Ag extraction, leading to dilution due to the formation of H 2 O. This H 2 O in the MSA solution hinders the Ag extraction. In this study, we present a fractional distillation process for restoring the reactivity of reused MSA solutions by reducing the H 2 O content. Our results showed that the reactivity of the separated MSA was restored and Ag could be recovered from the solar cell.

Keywords: solar cell; silver; methanesulfonic acid; fractional distillation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/13/3659/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/13/3659/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:13:p:3659-:d:245281

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().