From Cathodes to Conductive Pastes: A New Perspective into the Recycle of Silver Element
Abstract
Silver is needed for various energy storage or conversion devices involving batteries and solar cells. Herein, a method for recycling silver elements from Mg/AgCl batteries to heterojunction solar cells is reported. A surfactant-assisted solvothermal route is presented to synthesize AgCl polyhedral microparticles in ethylene glycol at 160 °C. Some AgCl are reduced to Ag after electron irradiation. The AgCl–Ag hybrid materials can be utilized as aqueous magnesium battery-conductive additive-free cathodes and deliver a high power density of 14 mW cm−2 at 10 mA cm−2. Ag nanoparticles (NPs) with a diameter in the range of 50–200 nm are obtained through the discharge reaction of AgCl cathodes. Benefiting from their excellent filling and sintering effects, the introduction of Ag NPs significantly improves the conductivity of silver pastes, whose resistivity and contact resistance are decreased by 67% and 68%, respectively. Solar cells that use the previous silver pastes are shown to promote a ≈1.2 times increase in power conversion efficiency and achieve 25.13%. The increased electricity generation is estimated to reach 66 kW h m−2 every year.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Open Research
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
