Method for recycling silicon photovoltaic modules

A method for recovering metallic materials from crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules, the method comprising:

• removing aluminum frames and junction boxes from the photovoltaic modules to provide photovoltaic sandwich structures;
• shredding the photovoltaic sandwich structures to form photovoltaic sandwich structure particles, the photovoltaic sandwich structure particles comprising:
• metallic particles, silicon particles, glass particles and polymer particles;
• sieving the photovoltaic sandwich structure particles to provide feed photovoltaic sandwich structure particles having a predefined maximum particle size;
• feeding a monolayer of the feed photovoltaic sandwich structure particles to an electrostatic separator, and electrostatically separating the photovoltaic sandwich structure particles into a first fraction and a second fraction with the electrostatic separator, the electrostatic separator comprising:
• a grounded rotating roll electrode rotating at about 30 rpm about a substantially horizontal longitudinal roll electrode axis;
• a corona electrode and an electrostatic electrode, wherein a difference in electric potential between the corona and electrostatic electrodes and the roll electrode define an electric potential difference of the electrostatic separator of about 25 kV;
• a splitter sized, positioned and angled for splitting the first and second fractions;
• a surface brush for dislodging second fraction particles from the surface of the grounded rotating roll electrode;
• and
• a humidity sensor for measuring humidity, wherein electrostatically separating the photovoltaic sandwich structure particles is conducted at a humidity of less than about 60%;
• and
• feeding at least a portion of the second fraction to an electrostatic separator for one or more subsequent electrostatic separations into the first and second fractions;
• wherein the first fraction comprises less than 5 percent by weight of total polymer particles and is substantially free of glass particles.