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US 7,731,920 B2Granted
System and method for separating tellurium from cadmium waste
AssigneeBrookhaven Science Associates, LLC
InventorsVasilis Fthenakis, Wenming Wang
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The present invention relates to a method and system for recovery of waste.
Claims23
A method for recycling a photovoltaic device comprising:
- fragmenting a photovoltaic device;
- exposing at least a portion of a photovoltaic device with a leaching agent to form a liquid phase, including tellurium and cadmium extracted from the photovoltaic device, and a solid phase;
- separating the liquid phase from the solid phase;
- contacting the liquid phase with a cation exchange resin;
- collecting from the resin a tellurium containing solution comprising substantially all of the extracted tellurium;
- and
- removing cadmium from the resin.
4 more elements
A method for separating cadmium and tellurium comprising:
- contacting a tellurium-containing solution with a cation exchange resin;
- collecting from the resin a solution comprising substantially all of the tellurium of the tellurium-containing solution;
- and
- removing cadmium from the cation exchange resin.
1 more element
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.