Crushing and separation line for PV module material

There is a well-established alternative route in which modules go straight to size reduction and everything is separated afterwards from a mixed granulate. It is a legitimate engineering choice with a smaller footprint and fewer stations, and it is the right answer for some plants.

What it cannot do is give you clean aluminium and clean glass, because both are contaminated from the moment the frame goes through the mill alongside the laminate. If those two streams are where your revenue comes from, dismantling comes first and reduction comes after — on material that no longer contains a frame or a junction box.

• Size reduction. Reduces the delaminated sheet to a handling size, with extraction sized for the dust this step generates.
• Screening. Splits the reduced material by size, which separates a large part of the glass from the finer cell and encapsulant fraction.
• Magnetic separation. Takes out ferrous contamination — usually from frames, fasteners and site debris rather than from the module itself.
• Eddy current separation. Recovers non-ferrous metals such as aluminium fragments and copper remaining in the stream.
• Density or air separation. Separates lighter polymer and encapsulant from heavier glass and metal fractions.
• Containment and collection. Sealed transfer and collection points, plus weighing per output stream.

Every separation stage on this site is judged by what it produces, and every one of them produces fines. Fines block transfer points, they escape to the floor if extraction is undersized, and they change the composition of whatever stream they settle into.

The practical requirements are unglamorous: extraction at each break and transfer point, sealed collection rather than open bins, transfer geometry without ledges where material accumulates, and maintenance access so that cleaning is a routine task. A separation stage that is difficult to clean will be cleaned less often than it needs to be, and that shows up as a falling output quality rather than as a machine fault.