University of Leicester scientists have developed a technique for sustainably extracting valuable metals from a waste product of used batteries with a mix of water and cooking oil. The patent pending technology allows lithium-ion battery black mass, a low-value mixture of anode and cathode and other materials, to be purified directly within minutes of operation at room temperature.
With billions of these batteries used worldwide in electronics and electric vehicles, it could enable a cheaper and more sustainable recycling method to support the switch to green technologies. Research led by Professor Andy Abbott and Dr Jake Yang at the University of Leicester working under the Faraday Institution’s ReLiB project found an innovative way of recovering valuable battery-grade metal oxides from crushed batteries by using nanoemulsions created from a trace of cooking oil in water.
The Leicester-developed emulsion technique allows short-loop recycling of lithium-ion batteries. The battery-grade crystalline structure of the recovered material is not destroyed in this process and allows the remanufacturing of the recovered material directly back into new battery cells, unlike pyro/hydrometallurgical methods. This could potentially make the battery supply chain more sustainable and cheaper.
Source: University of Leicester
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