ERI: A Fundamental Investigation of the Effectiveness of Cathode Regeneration Process for Spent Lithium Ion Batteries

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). As the consumption of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in the transportation and consumer electronic sectors rapidly increases, the volume of spent LIBs requiring disposal or recycling is expected to reach more than 11 million metric tons by 2030. However, less than 5% of spent LIBs are currently recycled. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop an environmentally friendly and economically viable LIB recycling technology to manage the hazardous, albeit valuable, large volumes of spent LIBs. This project will systematically explore a direct recycling process that could potentially maximize the return value from end-of-life LIBs, aiming to recover and reuse the most valuable cathode material in spent LIBs for new LIB manufacturing. The outcomes of the project will facilitate the development of direct cathode recycling that contributes to minimizing the environmental impacts of LIB wastes, securing the future supply of battery raw materials, lowering the cost of LIB production, and improving the sustainability of the LIB industry. The research results will be broadly disseminated through academic journals, conferences, science festivals, and educational videos, inspiring new ideas for LIB recycling technologies and improving people’s understanding of the economic and environmental impacts of LIB recycling. Furthermore, students of various education levels, especially underrepresented minorities and women in the STEM fields, will be trained by providing hands-on laboratory experiences. The overarching goal of this project is to establish a fundamental understanding of the effectiveness of direct recycling on spent cathodes at different degrees of degradation. Given the fact that end-of-life LIBs are generated under different cycling conditions, the spent cathodes are expected to exhibit various levels of degradation that involve lithium loss, irreversible phase transformation, inter/intragranular cracking, dissolution of transition metals, and surface layer formation. To simulate the spent cathodes at various degradation conditions and how they are regenerated by a direct recycling process, different types of chemically delithiated cathodes are synthesized, characterized, and regenerated. This project seeks to attain its primary goal by pursuing two specific aims: (1) to examine the chemical, structural, and electrochemical stabilities of chemically delithiated cathodes during solvent-based separation processing and (2) to determine the effectiveness of direct cathode regeneration for rejuvenating chemically delithiated cathodes at different degradation extents. The findings from this research will advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind direct cathode recycling and accelerate the process development. The new knowledge gained from this project will lay a solid foundation to guide the formulation of strategies for effectively regenerating cathode materials from spent LIBs at different state-of-health conditions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.