Abstract:

Recycling of metals from spent lithium-ion batteries will bring great environmental and economic benefits. This paper summarizes the current process of metals recovery from lithium-ion batteries, including 4 steps of pre-treatment, battery material sorting, metals enrichment, separation and purification, and each step contains many methods. Development conditions, advantages, disadvantages and applications of these methods are analyzed, and it needs to select and integrate them to get better results in practice. Although above recycling technologies are mature and widely used in 4 kinds of spent lithium-ion batteries (LiCoO2, Ni-Co-Mn ternary materials, LiMn2O4 and LiFePO4) recycling field. The economics of metals recovery from spent lithium ion batteries is analyzed. The results show that LiCoO2 and Ni-Co-Mn ternary batteries have good benefits while LiMn2O4 and LiFePO4 batteries have no profits. It needs to strengthen research of spent batteries recovery technology, reduce costs and improve battery resource utilization to form a green and profitable recycling system of “lithium - ion battery production - sales - recovery - reproduction”.

Key words:  spent lithium-ion battery, metal, recycling technology, concentration, separation