Ecologically Friendly Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries - the Lithorec Process

Abstract

The increasing demand of lithium-ion batteries requires the recovery of active materials from spent lithium-ion batteries and production rejects in order to prevent a future shortage of lithium and other valuable raw materials. In contrast to existing recycling processes, the main goal of the LithoRec process is to achieve a high recycling yield and a low ecological impact as well as to efficiently recover all battery materials at battery grade quality. The project spams the entire recycling process starting from the discharging and disassembly stages, and following through with mechanical, chemical and thermal processing (e.g. crushing, grinding, classification, sorting, and extraction) used to separate the battery into recyclable fractions. In order to match the high purity standards of hydro-metallurgical processes for the production of battery active materials, the battery active materials have to be separated from the current collector foil very purely. For that purpose, a new patented separation process has been developed which shows a very high separation rate at high purity. The entire process was set up in pilot scale and operated with different spent battery systems. Results of this pilot trials will be discussed in the paper. Subsequently, new battery active materials have been produced and characterized in battery test cells.