Perspectives in Battery Recycling

Perspectives in Battery Recycling
ID	OSW09a91dceba99434c92adf70af51a85bb
UUID	09a91dce-ba99-434c-92ad-f70af51a85bb
Label	Perspectives in Battery Recycling
Machine compatible name	PerspectivesInBatteryRecycling
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Statements (incoming)

Description

An instance of the Battery 2030+ Excellence Seminar event series

Item
Type(s)/Category(s)	Event

Event
Event series
Start date	2024-04-30
End date	2024-04-30
Duration
Location
URL	https://battery2030.eu/news/excellence-seminars/perspectives-in-battery-recycling/
Organizer	Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC
Minutes taker
Project(s)	Battery 2030+
Associated OU(s)

Overview

This instance of the Battery 2030+ Excellence Seminar series moderated by Guinevere Giffin featured Martina Petranikova, Emma Kendrick, and Andreas Flegler presenting different aspects of battery recycling. It closed with a panel discussion among the participants.

Emma Kendrick is chair of energy materials at the University of Birmingham and co-lead of the energy materials group. Her work focuses on sustainable battery design from cradle to cradle. Materials, manufacturing and recycling for lithium-ion, sodium-ion and novel cell technologies.

Martina Petranikova has over 15 years’ experience in the waste management of spent batteries of all chemistries including directive, collection systems, discharging, dismantling and material recycling. Development of chemical processes for recovery and reuse of valuable metals and non-metallic components. Experience in the optimization and scaling up of the developed chemical processes. Research project leadership and supervision. Manager of a pilot plant for metal separation and mechanical pre-treatment.

Andreas Flegler is the Head of the Fraunhofer R&D Center Electromobility Bavaria at Fraunhofer ISC, the head of the Process Technology group and heads a BMBF BattFutur Research Group. His work focuses on novel process development for lithium-ion batteries and direct recycling. In addition, his group is developing and implementing design for recycling strategies for future of lithium-ion batteries.

Guinevere Giffin is currently the Scientific Head of the Fraunhofer R&D Center Electromobility Bavaria at Fraunhofer ISC and is doing her habilitation at the University of Würzburg. Her work focuses on the elucidation of structure-property-process relationships of materials and components for lithium-ion, sodium-ion and solid-state batteries, supercapacitors and during battery recycling

Agenda

15:00-15:05 Intro BATTERY 2030+ Guinevere Giffin

15:05-15:35 Presentation “Advances in hydrometallurgical processing of Li-ion battery waste” Martina Petranikova

15:35-16:00 Presentation “Sustainable Routes to Recovery and Reuse of Battery Materials” Emma Kendrick

16:00- 16:25 Presentation “Design for Circularity Strategies to Enable Direct Recycling” Andreas Flegler

16:25-16:50 Panel discussion

16:50-17:00 Summary Guinevere Giffin

Recording

Perspectives in battery recycling

Transcript

Welcome

I would like to welcome everyone to today's excellence seminar. This seminar series is presented by Battery 2030+. For those who aren't familiar with Battery 2030+, it is an essential part of the European battery ecosystem, aiming to invent sustainable batteries for the future. If you'd like to learn more about us and the initiative, please visit our website, which can be easily found by searching "Battery 2030+" on Google.

In May, the annual conference for Battery 2030+ will be held in Grenoble on the 28th and 29th. There are still places available, including opportunities for young scientists. We always encourage young scientists to attend and present their work. If you're interested in coming and presenting a poster about your research at Battery 2030+, you can submit your abstracts either by visiting www.meetbattery2030.eu or using the QR code currently displayed on the screen.

Battery 2030+ has been organizing this Excellence Seminar for quite some time. Here, you can see some of the past presenters from the seminar series. Today’s topic is Perspectives in Battery Recycling, and we are fortunate to have three speakers who will provide various insights into this important subject, particularly in Europe. Our speakers are Martina Petranikova, Emma Kendrick, and Andreas Flegler.

Our first speaker will be Martina Petranikova, who will discuss Advances in Hydrometallurgical Processing of Lithium-Ion Battery Waste. Martina, I will now stop sharing my screen, and the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. Let me share my screen. Can you see it?

Yes, but not in presentation mode.
I think it's coming now.

Okay, what about now?

Perfect.

Advances in hydrometallurgical processing of Li-ion battery waste, Martina Petranikova

Thank you for inviting me to present today. Just to introduce myself, I am from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Our group has been working on battery recycling for over 15 or 16 years. Today, I’ll briefly discuss battery materials, specifically focusing on the motivation behind recycling, followed by the hydrometallurgical processes used in lithium-ion battery recycling. I’ll also share some of the research from our group at Chalmers.

It’s widely known that Europe is focusing heavily on battery production, especially for electric vehicles, but we lack the raw materials needed to sustain this effort. This is why recycling is critical. For those not familiar with the composition of lithium-ion batteries, the main components are transition metals, including lithium cobalt oxide, lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide, and lithium iron phosphate, as well as aluminium.

One thing to note is that efforts to reduce the amount of cobalt, due to its price and criticality, also reduce its presence in battery waste. This can decrease the economic incentive for recycling. On the anode side, we mainly find graphite, often artificial, which is favorable for hydrometallurgical processing as it is neutral and easily recovered.

However, doping elements like titanium and tin, used in some batteries, complicate the recycling process. Electrolytes, typically lithium salts with organic solvents, are troublemakers during recycling, as they are difficult to remove and can interfere with hydrometallurgical processes. Binders like PVDF and current collectors, such as metallic copper and aluminium, also play a role in the recycling challenge.

The motivation for recycling is both legal and environmental. In the European Union, battery regulations mandate recycling efficiencies, particularly focusing on transition metals and lithium. By 2027, and even more so by 2031, recyclers will face increasingly stringent targets. Additionally, battery producers will be required to incorporate recycled materials into new batteries, which presents a significant challenge.

Aside from regulatory requirements, we also have critical raw materials like manganese, copper, and nickel, which, while not classified as critical, are considered strategic. Recycling is also profitable for companies, as the recovered metals can be resold. However, we must fulfill the growing demand for materials like nickel, which means both mining and recycling are necessary.

There are currently two main recycling methods: pyrometallurgy, where batteries are smelted together, and hydrometallurgy, which typically involves a mechanical pretreatment followed by chemical processing. Pyrometallurgy results in a metal alloy that requires further chemical treatment, while hydrometallurgy focuses on recovering the black mass from mechanical pretreatment for chemical processing.

I'll now focus on the hydrometallurgical steps, starting with leaching, where metals are dissolved into a solution. Impurities like iron, aluminium, and copper are removed in this step, typically followed by solvent extraction or co-precipitation to recover transition metals. Lithium is usually the last to be recovered.

There are various combinations of hydrometallurgical methods, and I’ll explain one in particular: solvent extraction. This method, which is also used in primary metal production, employs organic molecules that selectively recover metals based on pH changes. The process is quite efficient and can achieve battery-grade purity for metals like cobalt and manganese. Lithium is usually precipitated at the end of the process, achieving high purity as well.

At Chalmers, we have focused on electrolyte removal using supercritical CO2. This method, researched by Dr. Burçak Ebin and his team, effectively removes electrolytes and binders, which helps in obtaining purer material for hydrometallurgical processing.

We’ve also been working on two recycling approaches. One follows the traditional route of removing impurities and separating transition metals. The other approach prioritizes lithium recovery first, before processing other elements, which allows us to minimize lithium loss and waste generation. In this newer approach, thermal pretreatment is used to convert lithium into lithium carbonate, which is water-leachable.

Our PhD students are also exploring the use of organic acids, like oxalic acid, for lithium recovery. Preliminary results show nearly 100% lithium recovery, with aluminium being removed as an impurity in a single step. This significantly simplifies the process.

Mechanical activation is another area we’re researching, which enhances the leaching efficiency of lithium and cobalt by up to 10%. Though the energy cost of milling is high, this method can increase the overall recycling efficiency.

Lastly, we’ve been optimizing hydrogen peroxide consumption, an important reagent in the hydrometallurgical process. Through various experiments, we’ve found that pyrolysis-treated samples require less hydrogen peroxide for complete recovery, especially when compared to incinerated materials, which show poorer recovery rates.

With that, I would like to conclude by thanking you for your attention. If you are interested in our work, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn.

Thank you very much, Martina. For the viewers, please submit your questions in the Q&A box below. We will return to them during the panel discussion later today.

Sustainable Routes to Recovery and Reuse of Battery Materials, Emma Kendrick

Next, I would like to introduce our second speaker, Emma Kendrick, who will be presenting Sustainable Routes to Recovery and Reuse of Battery Materials.

So, today I’m going to talk a little bit about how we can recover battery materials and then look at directly reusing them. If we think about sustainability, we need to approach it holistically—considering where materials come from, how much of those materials are recycled, and how they are transformed into electrodes, cells, and finally reclaimed at the end of their life to complete the circular economy.

One key focus is reducing the energy inputs and environmental impacts along the entire value chain for lithium-ion battery systems and potentially other battery technologies. Today, I’ll focus on the recovery of materials. As Martina has already discussed, we can recover these materials and remanufacture them, but is there a way we can create a short loop?

This is the critical materials list. It highlights the number of materials used in batteries that are considered critical. You’ll notice at the bottom, materials like nickel and copper aren’t in the critical category but are called strategic materials. These materials are crucial for many of the technologies we rely on. Additionally, it’s important to understand that the criticality of these materials is influenced by supply risks and economic factors, which include where the materials come from, the governance of those countries, and the recycling input rate.

Recycling can play a major role in reducing material criticality. By increasing recycling, we can reduce the reliance on virgin raw materials. Aside from recycling, other strategies include substituting materials (like replacing lithium with sodium) and reusing materials for other technologies.

I’ve done some assessments comparing the criticality and value of different cathode materials for lithium-ion and sodium-ion technologies. Substituting lithium with sodium reduces the material’s criticality, but sodium systems still present their own challenges. Moreover, the economic value of recycled materials can vary significantly between technologies.

If we look at the value of primary lithium materials (such as spodumene) versus secondary materials (recycled battery materials), batteries often contain significantly more valuable materials than primary sources. For instance, petalite, a lithium ore, is lower in lithium content compared to what we can recover from lithium-ion batteries. So, it makes sense to recover lithium from secondary sources.

Additionally, cobalt and nickel—high-value metals—make recycling economically viable. However, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and sodium-ion batteries present a different case, as their values are much lower, which could affect recycling viability.

This brings me to the concept of direct recycling, or short-loop recycling, where we recover the active materials and reprocess them into a new electrode without the need to return to a metallic state. By doing so, we can retain the value of the active material, which would otherwise be lost in traditional recycling routes.

Typical recycling routes involve pyrometallurgy, where metals are recovered as alloys, or hydrometallurgy, which recovers salts that can be remanufactured into active materials. However, direct recycling looks at directly recovering the active materials and using them as-is to create new electrodes and cells, bypassing some of the more resource-intensive processes.

Here are a few examples of different recycling methods. On the left, you can see a Generation 1 Nissan Leaf cell being shredded. Shredding tends to mix all the highly engineered components of the cell together, making it more challenging to recover pure materials. Alternatively, on the right, one of our researchers is manually disassembling a cell under a fume hood. This careful disassembly allows us to separate the components, like the anode, cathode, and separator, for cleaner material streams.

We are also working on automating this process. In the video below, we demonstrate a robotic system that identifies and separates the different cell components to reduce contamination and create purer material streams for reprocessing.

Next, we’ve looked at both disassembly and shredding. Starting with shredding, the first step is to recover the electrolyte through a drying process. After shredding, we use an electrostatic process that ionizes the feedstock, separating the conductive materials from the non-conductive materials, like the separator. As shown in the image, we can achieve a 97% separation efficiency.

After electrostatic separation, we employ magnetic separation to further separate materials. Since cathode materials tend to be paramagnetic, we use magnets to exploit this property and separate the aluminium-coated parts from the copper-coated ones. Here’s an example of an aluminium-coated cathode that has been separated using this process.

From there, we grind the materials into powder. We have two processes for this: ultrasound delamination followed by filtration, which produces powdered black mass. This black mass is then separated into anodic and cathodic black mass. For example, we’ve done this with Generation 2 Nissan Leaf cells, both with quality control rejects and end-of-life cells. We’ve found that QC rejects, which weren’t filled with electrolyte, were harder to delaminate as the aluminium corroded, requiring us to dissolve it out.

Once we’ve separated the cathode material, we can relithiate it. Both the QC-rejected and end-of-life materials showed good specific capacities after relithiation. We still need to improve the delamination process, as PVDF binder presents challenges.

PVDF is a particular issue. When burned, it produces HF gas, which can delithiate the materials if present in large quantities. Ideally, we would like to use water-based binders, such as CMC/SBR, that are easier to remove. For example, in a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cell, we’ve demonstrated that a simple water-based delamination process can produce high-purity black mass with minimal binder contamination.

In fact, we recovered 97% of the lithium iron phosphate material using this method, and it shows promise for future recycling efforts.

We are also exploring an ice-stripping method for delamination, which uses very little water. The electrode is placed onto a cold plate, causing it to stick, and then we peel it off, leaving behind a clean aluminium foil. This method can potentially be adapted for reel-to-reel or in-line processing.

Finally, we’ve applied this to sodium-ion systems. By heating the material to 300°C, we decompose the binder compounds, reducing the particle size. We’ve demonstrated that directly recovered hard carbon can perform similarly to pristine materials in half-cell tests. In full cells, the directly recovered material performs well, but higher first-cycle losses and lower capacities occur at higher temperatures.

We’re continuing this work through the Revitalise project, which aims to improve the separation and direct recycling of various lithium and sodium-ion materials.

In summary, improving recycling rates can reduce material criticality and supply risks. We’ve shown that electrostatic and magnetic separation can help reduce impurities in black mass, and binder choice is crucial for improving recycling efficiency. Ice stripping is a promising method for low-energy, low-waste delamination, and direct recycling of NMC 532, LFP, and hard carbon materials is feasible.

Thank you to my group and funding sources, and thank you all for your attention.

Design for Circularity Strategies to Enable Direct Recycling, Andreas Flegler

Today, I will focus on the design for recycling to enable direct recycling. We’ve already heard about the importance of battery recycling and approaches like hydrometallurgy and direct recycling. My talk will focus on how design for circularity can support these efforts.

I want to begin by briefly introducing my group at Wurzburg, where we have 35 researchers working on topics related to lithium-ion, sodium-ion, and solid-state batteries. About five years ago, we started exploring direct recycling, and more recently, we’ve been looking at design strategies to enhance the circularity of future batteries.

When we look at different recycling methods—pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, and direct recycling—we must consider which method is best suited for different types of waste streams. For example, in the consumer electronics sector, where we have mixed battery chemistries, pyrometallurgy is often the best choice because we don’t have detailed information about the cell chemistry. However, for electric vehicle (EV) and stationary batteries, we have more knowledge about the chemistries, which allows for hydrometallurgical processing.

Direct recycling is currently more feasible for production scrap, but with the growing market for low-value chemistries like LFP and sodium-ion, we need more efficient recycling methods. The European Commission’s battery regulations, which mandate material recovery and the inclusion of recycled content in new batteries, will also push us towards more sustainable approaches.

To shift low-value materials like LFP to more efficient recycling processes, we need to think about design for circularity. By rethinking the design phase, we can improve the ease of recycling and move towards strategies like refurbishment and remanufacturing, instead of just focusing on recovery at the end of a battery's life.

In our research, we’re focusing on a range of topics related to circularity, from cell production to disassembly, separator recovery, coating detachment, and binder deactivation. In this talk, I’ll focus on a few key areas.

Starting with the cell production phase, we are working on aqueous processing for cathodes. This process eliminates the need for NMP and fluorinated PVDF binders, which simplifies recycling. However, aqueous processing presents challenges, such as the degradation of high-nickel cathode materials due to lithium leaching and aluminium corrosion. To address these issues, we are developing phosphate-based coatings for the active materials.

In binder development, we’re focusing on tailoring binders for easier recycling. Specifically, we’ve found that a higher degree of substitution in CMC species improves binder solubility and distribution in the electrode, which leads to better electrochemical performance and easier recycling.

In sorting, we’re working with magnetic particles as identifiers, integrating them into battery cells as markers for cell chemistry. This helps in the sorting process and can serve as a counterfeit protection measure. We’ve integrated these markers into the cell casing, cathodes, and separators, and we’re currently working on automating the process for large-scale implementation.

For cell disassembly, we’re developing a contactless method using inductive heating to open pouch cells and prismatic cells. This technique focuses the heat on the cell's sealing polymer without damaging the electrolyte, enabling safe disassembly. Additionally, we’ve set up a robot system to automate the disassembly of prismatic cells.

When it comes to coating detachment, we’re working with electric hydraulic fragmentation to delaminate electrodes and separate the foils. This method produces fractions of LFP-rich material, which we can then process further.

For active material separation, we’re using a semi-continuous centrifuge to separate high-density particles from black mass. This process, coupled with binder deactivation, helps recover active materials for reuse.

In conclusion, a regulatory framework is crucial for setting standards for design for circularity. Implementing these strategies will be especially important for low-value chemistries like LFP and sodium-ion batteries. The battery sector has the potential to become a role model for other industries by moving from a linear to a circular economy.

Thank you very much for your attention. I’d also like to thank my group, our project partners, and our funding sources.

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