Recycling and treatment technology of lithium ion battery

In recent years,the huge demand for lithium-ion batteries in the market, on the one hand, will lead to a large number of waste batteries in the future. How to deal with these waste lithium-ion batteries to reduce their impact on the environment.

On the other hand, in order to meet the huge market demand, manufacturers need to produce a large number of lithium-ion batteries to supply the market.Spent lithium-ion batteries contain a lot of metal resources such as cobalt (Co), lithium (Li), nickel (Ni), manganese (Mn), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), including a variety of rare metal resources.

Part of the metal content in waste lithium-ion batteries is higher than that in natural ores. Therefore, in the case of increasing shortage of production resources, recycling of waste batteries has certain economic value.

According to the classification of extraction process, battery recovery methods can be mainly divided into three categories: dry recovery, wet recovery and biological recovery.

1. Dry recycling

Dry recovery refers to the direct recovery of materials or valuable metals without solution and other media. Among them, the main methods are physical separation and high-temperature pyrolysis.

(1) Physical sorting method

The physical separation method refers to the disassembly and separation of batteries, and the crushing, sieving, magnetic separation, fine crushing and classification of battery components such as electrode active substances, collector fluid and battery shell to obtain valuable and high content substances.

(2) Pyrolysis

The high-temperature pyrolysis method refers to the high-temperature calcination and decomposition of lithium battery materials that have undergone preliminary separation treatment such as physical crushing, and the removal of organic adhesives, so as to separate the constituent materials of lithium battery. At the same time, the metal and its compounds in the lithium battery can be oxidized, reduced and decomposed, volatilized in the form of steam, and then collected by condensation and other methods.

2. Biological recovery

Mishra et al. used inorganic acids and acidophilic thiobacillus ferrooxidans to leach metals from waste lithium ion batteries, and used S and ferrous ions (Fe2+) to generate H2SO4, Fe3+and other metabolites in the leaching medium.

3. Wet recovery

The wet recovery process is to break up and dissolve the waste battery, and then use appropriate chemical reagents to selectively separate the metal elements in the leaching solution to produce high-grade cobalt metal or lithium carbonate for direct recovery.

(1)Organic solvent extraction

The organic solvent extraction method uses the principle of "similarity and compatibility" to physically dissolve the organic binder with appropriate organic solvent, so as to weaken the adhesion between the material and the foil and separate them.

(2) Alkali acid leaching method

Since the cathode material of lithium ion battery will not be dissolved in alkali solution, while the aluminum foil of the base will be dissolved in alkali solution, this method is often used to separate aluminum foil.

4. Combined recovery method

Waste lithium battery recycling processes have their own advantages and disadvantages. At present, there have been research on recycling methods that combine and optimize multiple processes to give full play to the advantages of various recycling methods and maximize economic benefits.

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