AG13 battery

Which process is AG13 battery for recycling power batteries?

Why must batteries be recycled?

Some people call battery recycling the "last mile" of the new energy vehicle industry. Power battery recycling is first of all a safety issue. If the owner is allowed to dismantle the battery selfishly, the probability of danger is very high, so from a safety perspective, power batteries must be recycled.

From an environmental perspective, lithium-ion batteries are indeed less polluting than lead-acid batteries, but this does not mean there is no pollution, such as pollution caused by materials such as phosphorus and fluorine.

Another very important point is that from a resource perspective, if power batteries are not recycled, new energy vehicles will be difficult to develop. Take cobalt resources as an example. 95% of my country's cobalt is imported, which is almost the same as having nothing. At present, about 70% of my country's oil comes from imports, which has risen to a resource strategy issue. If 95% of cobalt depends on imports, then resources will be more scarce, so power batteries must be recycled.

Recycling 1: Cascade Utilization

In terms of battery recycling, the first is cascade utilization, which not only saves resources, but also allows batteries such as lithium iron phosphate to further play the waste heat, making it more valuable in the recycling process, so cascade utilization is very worthy of consideration.

What are the important issues of cascade utilization at present? If the battery is selected and reorganized in a very standardized manner, its cost will be quite high. Moreover, many vehicles are afraid of poor contact when designing, so the battery pack is welded. It can be said that it is very difficult and costly to dismantle it for cascade utilization.

Another very important application is iron towers and energy storage. Power batteries can play a big role in this field, and industry professionals also know more about this aspect. Other aspects, such as small household energy storage, electric bicycles and other forms of cascade utilization, are very worthy of attention.

Recycling 2: Low-temperature freezing and crushing

Material recycling also needs to be introduced. The components in iron-lithium batteries and ternary lithium batteries may be slightly different, but not too different. In theory, these components are expected to be recycled, and they are expected to reduce and control pollution as much as possible during the recycling process. This is very worthy of study.

In terms of foreign battery recycling, the American Toxco company is representative. They have a liquid nitrogen freezing technology called low-temperature freezing and crushing. At more than 100 degrees below zero, the electrolyte of the battery is completely solidified, without safety issues or battery discharge issues, and at such a low temperature, the binder becomes very brittle and easy to separate.

After the power battery is cryogenically frozen and crushed, it is subjected to hydrometallurgy, acid and alkali extraction, the powder material is dissolved with acid, and then the cobalt salt, acid salt and other accessories are extracted and decomposed. Of course, there are still some incompatible materials that are difficult to recycle.

Recycling three: pyrometallurgy

In addition, there is another more mainstream pyrometallurgy abroad. Another American company, Inmetco, is a company that takes pyrometallurgy as its main route. One of its important features is that the battery is classified, initially disassembled and then placed in a high-temperature arc furnace for smelting. We call it high-temperature smelting, and in metallurgy we call it pyrometallurgy.

Under high temperature of thousands of degrees, all combustible things in the battery will be burned, such as graphite, carbon black, diaphragm electrolyte, etc. Appropriate control during the burning process can reduce metal oxides to metal alloys. At the same time, active metals such as copper and aluminum will float on the surface of the metal alloy solution in the form of oxide slag.

The disadvantage of pyrometallurgy is that the energy consumption is relatively high, but it has a very important advantage. This process has a good "appetite" and any battery can be put into it.

Recycling 4: Physical recycling process

Our recycling process at Central South University is mainly based on physical methods. It has several main links. The first one is called precise disassembly, followed by material repair. Compared with the previous wet metallurgy, our material repair is to dissolve it, and we re-synthesize the material and directly synthesize the material that can be used in the battery. Of course, there will be many details.

There are some comparative studies on electrical properties and atomization performance at Central South University, including low temperature performance and rate performance. These are all to compare the repaired materials with the purchased materials. The cycle performance of the repaired materials can reach 1700 times. At the same time, we also compared a lot of impurities. There will definitely be a small amount of impurities when using physical methods. These impurities actually have little impact within a controllable range.

In general, the performance of materials using physical recycling processes is still very close to that of newly purchased materials. This technology is mainly based on physical methods, has no pollution, and has a relatively short process flow. We predict that the net profit margin will be about 20%. We hope that our recycling process can be promoted to a certain extent in the future.

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