Closed Loop Recycling of Electric Vehicle Batteries to Enable Ultra-high Quality Cathode Powder

Mengyuan Chen,Jun Wang,Chao Shen,Dapeng Xu,Zhangfeng Zheng,Leslie Pinnell,Eric Gratz,Jin Liu,Qiang Wang,Ian O’Connor,Renata Arsenault,Xiaotu Ma,Yubin Zhang,Yan Wang,Paul Gionet,Yangtao Liu

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-38238-3

Abstract

The lithium-ion battery (LIB) recycling market is becoming increasingly important because of the widespread use of LIBs in every aspect of our lives. Mobile devices and electric cars represent the largest application areas for LIBs. Vigorous innovation in these sectors is spurring continuous deployment of LIB powered devices, and consequently more and more LIBs will become waste as they approach end of life. Considering the significant economic and environmental impacts, recycling is not only necessary, but also urgent. The WPI group has successfully developed a closed-loop recycling process, and has previously demonstrated it on a relatively small scale 1 kg spent batteries per experiment. Here, we show that the closed-loop recycling process can be successfully scaled up to 30 kg of spent LIBs from electric vehicle recycling streams, and the recovered cathode powder shows similar (or better) performance to equivalent commercial powder when evaluated in both coin cells and single layer pouch cells. All of these results demonstrate the closed-loop recycling process has great adaptability and can be further developed into industrial scale.

Highlights

The lithium-ion battery (LIB) recycling market is becoming increasingly important because of the widespread use of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in every aspect of our lives
We show that the closed-loop recycling process can be successfully scaled up to 30 kg of spent LIBs from electric vehicle recycling streams, and the recovered cathode powder shows similar performance to equivalent commercial powder when evaluated in both coin cells and single layer pouch cells
It is confirmed that our closed-loop recycling process can handle large format spent batteries that come from different commercial electrified vehicles (GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles e (FCA)), having different cathode chemistries

Summary

Introduction

The lithium-ion battery (LIB) recycling market is becoming increasingly important because of the widespread use of LIBs in every aspect of our lives. The WPI group has successfully developed a closed-loop recycling process, and has previously demonstrated it on a relatively small scale 1 kg spent batteries per experiment. We show that the closed-loop recycling process can be successfully scaled up to 30 kg of spent LIBs from electric vehicle recycling streams, and the recovered cathode powder shows similar (or better) performance to equivalent commercial powder when evaluated in both coin cells and single layer pouch cells.

Results

Conclusion