The rapid expansion of electric vehicle (EV) fleet calls for large number of lithium-ion batteries to be recycled at their end-of-life. Various recycling methods have been developed or under development to recover the high-value materials from retired lithium-ion batteries. Amongst these methods, direct recycling techniques have been developed and reported to recycle battery materials for reuse in new battery manufacturing since the electrochemical properties of the recycled materials can be fully recovered to the same level of pristine materials. In literature, innovative sintering processes have been developed to recover the composition and crystal structure of spent cathode materials; hydrothermal regeneration processes have been reported to regenerate the spent cathode materials in the solvents at a moderate temperature, followed by the high-temperature short annealing process. The regenerated cathode materials show the same specific capacity and cycling performance as those of pristine materials. The electrochemical regeneration method is applied to fully recover the electrochemical performance of cathode material with stable crystal structure. While the direct recycling techniques are still under development, their future applications in industry are still not clear. This study aims to classify and summarize state-of-the-art of the direct recycling methods, and evaluate the regenerated cathode materials’ performance and the application potential to be used for manufacturing of new lithium-ion batteries in future. The results will help increase understanding of the direct recycling technologies and facilitate the associated R&D for future industrial scaling-up of direct recycling processes for retired lithium ion batteries from electric vehicles.
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This content will become publicly available on June 26, 2024
Recycled Polymers As a Feedstock for Chemical Manufacturing Supply Chains in the United States: A Network Analysis for Polyethylene Pyrolysis
For chemical recycling of plastic wastes to be viable, chemical products generated in recycling need to find markets. A network model of the U.S. chemical manufacturing industry was used
to assess at what cost points, and the extent to which, chemical products from thermal pyrolysis of polyethylene might find markets in the current U.S. chemical manufacturing industry. Network modeling determined the cost points at which the simulated industry network utilized the thermal pyrolysis products and which processes were displaced by the supply of recycled materials. The characteristic feature of the simulations is the large number of processes in the chemical manufacturing network that are impacted by the availability of a relatively small number of products from polyethylene recycling. In the case of polyethylene recycling, the capital cost requirements for expanding capacity to effectively utilize the recycled materials is greater than the capital required for the pyrolysis process. This suggests that identifying scenarios where recycled materials can be utilized in processes that have excess capacity will be a critical consideration in techno-economic analyses of recycling plastics.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2029397
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10466764
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Chemical Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 25
- ISSN:
- 2168-0485
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 9394 to 9402
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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<bold>Article Highlights</bold> Fiber composite waste was successfully recycled into denser, high-pressure compacted ordinary Portland cement materials.
High-pressure compacted cement samples containing 6% recycled admixtures retained 90% of their compression strength after salt aging.
The high-pressure compaction method utilized 70% less water during specimen fabrication.
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