Featured in Gas busters – 09-2020

Materials in the circular economy

A number of companies are now racing to find new materials to replace toxic or otherwise unsafe elements in PV modules, in pursuit of circular economic ideals. In a similar vein, many researchers are also looking for ways to recycle and reuse some of these materials at the end of solar panel lifetimes. In line with these efforts, artificial intelligence and machine learning now play a critical role in identifying new chemical footprints for PV modules and cells.

By

Brian Publicover

08 Sep 2020

Earlier this year, SoliTek secured cradle-to-cradle ‘silver’ certification for its glass-glass solar modules. | Image: SoliTek

Professor Krishna Rajan – a materials informatics specialist in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo – focuses on understanding materials at the atomic and molecular scale. He says that the use of artificial intelligence has long been commonplace in his field.“The use of AI methods in material sciences have …

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