Efficient Separation of Aluminum Foil and Cathode Materials from Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries Using a Low-Temperature Molten Salt

By Mengmeng Wang, Quanyin Tan, Lili Liu, Jinhui Li. ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 2019

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The effective separation of aluminum (Al) foil and cathode materials is a critical issue for the recycling of spent lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Previous studies have shown that the strong binding force provided by the organic binder polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) between the cathode materials and the Al foil of spent LIBs makes it difficult to peel off the cathode materials from the Al foil, reducing the effectiveness of the metal recovery process. This study reports on a low-temperature molten salt technology for melting the organic binder PVDF. The results showed that an aluminum chloride-sodium chloride (AlCl3-NaCl) system—a nontoxic reaction medium—could melt PVDF efficiently and is environmentally friendly as well, because of the phase transformation of molten salt caused by heat storage. The optimal conditions for peeling off cathode materials were a temperature of 160 °C, molten salt:cathode electrode mass ratio of 10:1, and holding time of 20 min. The highest peeling off percentage of cathode ma...

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63b6bcc8b8d3af12e480d6ecb670d74c5ce6dcda