Study on manufacturing of recycled SiC powder from solar wafering sludge and its application

Abstract

Slurry containing SiC powder and oil is used to cut ingots with a wire in a solar cell wafering process. The slurry, which is generally recycled due to its high price, produces a residue known as sludge during the recycling process. The sludge is mainly composed of SiC, Si, and oil. This study proposed a method to remove Si and oil from sludge to obtain a high-purity SiC powder of approximately 98.5% in an economically feasible manner. Additionally, this study utilized the recycled SiC powder to develop a porous SiC ceramic heat sink with thermal conductivity of about 10W/mK and showed that the heat sink can be used as an efficient apparatus to release heat of electronics.