Photovoltaic Panel Recycling: Delamination & Material Recovery

Solar panels last 25–30 years, but the industry is now approaching its first real wave of end-of-life modules — and what happens to them depends entirely on which recycling process a facility runs. This simulator models a crystalline-silicon module coming apart on a real recycling line: glass and the aluminum frame separate mechanically, the EVA encapsulant is burned off in a thermal pyrolysis step to free the silicon wafers, and a final chemical leach recovers the silver busbars. Each material stream follows first-order recovery kinetics, with the thermal and chemical steps obeying the Arrhenius temperature law, so switching process method, raising the process temperature or scrubbing through process time changes how much of each stream — and how much of the recovered value, since silver dominates it despite being a trace of the panel's mass — actually comes back out.