Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has backed a research project aimed ay developing a cost effective means of recycling Lithium-ion batteries with the use of electro-hydraulic fragmentation of materials by shock waves.
The NEW-BAT project is to be led by two partners – the Fraunhofer Project Group for Materials Recycling and Resource Strategies IWKS at Alzenau and Hanau, acting as project coordinator, and its parent institute the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC at Würzburg.
According to Fraunhofer each will contribute expertise and experience in recycling, substitution, and resource strategies, as well as in the development of materials and electrochemical energy storage devices.
The reseachers explained that lithium-ion batteries are key elements in electromobility and the widespread use of these energy storage devices will mean large quantities of spent batteries which constitute a valuable source of raw materials.
Current Recycling Technology
Fraunhofer explained that currently only energy-intensive metallurgical methods are in place to recycle used batteries and scrap materials from battery production, and even these are limited to the recovery of elementary metals.
That was said to mean that profitability can only be achieved for metals such as nickel, cobalt, or manganese. It would make economic sense, however, to recover the actual battery materials as production from base elements is costly and complex.
The recovery of high-grade lithium metal oxides, for example, or hitherto non-recyclable carbon compounds could mean significant savings in energy and cost and could contribute to securing valuable resources like lithium.
To achieve this the NEW-BAT project has been granted €1.6 million funding within the framework of the »r4« research initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF (r4 – Innovative technologies for resource efficiency – Research for the supply of raw materials of strategic economic importance).
Scientists and engineers from research institutions and industry will join forces to develop a new system to completely recover and process all battery materials for direct reuse in new batteries.
The team is led by Andreas Bittner from the Fraunhofer Project Group for Materials Recycling and Resource Strategies IWKS.
Intelligent separation
The most distinctive feature of the new recycling process is said to be the electro-hydraulic fragmentation of materials by shock waves, which takes place under water or in other liquids.
The shock waves are generated by an electrical discharge, and the water or other liquid serves to uniformly impart them onto the in-feed material.
The method is claimed to enable composites and building blocks to come apart at the interfaces of different materials in a practically non-contact manner.
The material mix thus derived from the many battery components – cathode, anode, electrolyte, separator as well as cell and battery casings – can then be sorted out efficiently in the next step.
In order to obtain the purest recyclates possible, separation methods are said to account for physical properties such as grain size and density as well as for varied chemical compositions.
At no point does this method involve high temperature processes, which is said to make it much more energy-efficient than metallurgical recycling technologies. It is equally suitable for spent batteries and scrap material from battery production.
Functional coatings
The electrode materials are the parts of a battery which age the most during its life. Recycled materials therefore must be tested and treated to restore their original quality.
Project partner Fraunhofer ISC said that it can perform special low temperature procedures suitable for Lithium-ion battery materials to remove undesirable degradation products from surfaces and to repair crystal structure defects.
This treatment can also be combined with the application of a finishing core-shell coating which is claimed to significantly improve the life and the charge and discharge properties of the recycled materials.
The Team
The two R&D partners – the Fraunhofer Project Group for Materials Recycling and Resource Strategies IWKS at Alzenau and Hanau are joined in the project by industry partners from recycling, battery manufacturing and plant engineering, the Lars Walch GmbH & Co. KG at Baudenbach, the GRS Service GmbH at Hamburg and the ImpulsTec GmbH located in Dresden.
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