Ecological Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries from Electric Vehicles with Focus on Mechanical Processes

By J. Diekmann, C. Hanisch, Linus Froboese, Gerrit Schälicke, Thomas Loellhoeffel, Anne-Sophie Foelster, A. Kwade. 2017

291 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The increasing usage of electrical drive systems and stationary energy storage worldwide lead to a high demand of raw materials for the production of lithium-ion batteries. To prevent further shortage of these crucial materials, ecological and efficient recycling processes of lithium-ion batteries are needed. Nowadays industrial processes are mostly pyrometallurgical and as such energy and cost intensive. The LithoRec projects, funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB), aimed at a realization of a new energy-efficient recycling process, abstaining high temperatures and tracing mechanical process-steps. The conducted mechanical processes were thoroughly investigated by experiments in a laboratory and within technical scale, describing gas release of aged and non-aged lithium-ion batteries during dry crushing, intermediates, and products of the mechanical separation. Conclusively, we found that applying a second crushing step increases the yield of the coating materials, but also enables more selective separation. This work identifies the need for recycling of lithium-ion batteries and its challenges and hazard potential in regards to the applied materials. The outlined results show a safe and ecological recycling process with a material recycling rate of at least 75%. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. [DOI: 10.1149/2.0271701jes] All rights reserved.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85bc3c2820ec166403d766f6c2c6f5df689589cb

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Citations in the corpus

A Comprehensive Review of Li-Ion Battery Materials and Their Recycling Techniques (2020, background): “A cell proposal for recovery of materials is extremely alluring, with low-cost water-soluble binders [308,309].”
Recovery of valuable metals from lithium-ion batteries NMC cathode waste materials by hydrometallurgical methods (2018, background): “In order to recover the valuable metals from several types of LIBs, measures have been reported involving mechanical processes [15], mechano-chemical processes [16], thermal treatment [17,18], and dissolution processes.”
A Critical Review of Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Processes from a Circular Economy Perspective (2019, background): “, forklifts, trucks, EVs, HEVs, and e-bikes [92].”
Industrial Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries—A Critical Review of Metallurgical Process Routes (2020, background): “In this case, specific safety measures are mandatory to prevent explosion and ignition during the mechanical treatment [72].”
The Recycling of Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries: a Review of Current Processes and Technologies (2018, methodology): “The mechanical separation of spent LIBs aims to remove outer plastics and shells to concentrate inner metallic components and commonly used methods include crushing [32, 34, 40, 41], sieving [34, 41, 42], flotation [43–46], gravity separation [32, 40, 42, 47, 48], and magnetic separation [36].”
A Review on Environmental, Economic and Hydrometallurgical Processes of Recycling Spent Lithium-ion Batteries (2020, methodology): “Two common methods used to neutralize lithium-ion battery are as follows: (1) Heating up to 300°C (also leading to the removal and evaporation of the electrolyte) (Diekmann et al. 2017).”