Industrial and Laboratory Processing of Spent Li-Ion Batteries for Efficient Materials Recovery

Daniela de Oliveira e Silva

Key information

Authors:

Daniela de Oliveira e Silva (Daniela De Oliveira e Silva)

Supervisors:

Fernanda Maria Ramos da Cruz Margarido (Fernanda Maria Ramos da Cruz Margarido); Carlos Alberto Gonçalves Nogueira

Published in

11/24/2021

Abstract

With the increasing number of electric vehicles on the road, the need to develop solutions to treat the batteries coming from these vehicles rose. The necessity to treat these batteries comes from the use of critical raw materials and a need for an alternative to their exploitation. The objective of this work was to develop at an industrial scale, a deactivation and dismantling procedure of batteries for further treatment, including mass balance of components that compose the battery. At the laboratory scale, the purpose was to determine the percentage of each component, type of chemistry used and morphologically characterise some of the cells while studying the impact of the previously imposed treatments. For deactivating the batteries an ohmic discharge and different brine/caustic solutions were used. Ohmic discharge will not influence the structure of the cells and it may be possible to deliver some of the charge back to the plant facilities. However, when there are low voltages, it may take several hours to reach safety levels of charge. When using solutions, one is always conditioned by the liquid effluents treatment, however, depending on the shape of the cell, the perfect solution conditions can be calculated for a faster discharge. By analysing the 10 cells it can be concluded that the most used technology is in fact NMC, particularly NMC111. On average, the cell is responsible for 68.08% of the total weight of the battery, followed by the module (18.66%) and the battery periphery system that composes the pack (13.26%).