This project is prompted by the urgent need for both i) efficient recycling processes of End-of-Life (EoL) batteries, which are becoming more and more abundant in Europe, and ii) production of high performance materials for batteries at competitive cost. Particularly, electrodes active materials, including strategic-critical raw materials such as graphite, cobalt, nickel and manganese, which account for more than 50% of the battery cost, need to be recovered from EU resources and recycled into the batteries manufacturing chain.
Here, a novel recycling route for EoL Li-ion batteries, showing lower processing cost and better environmental impact as compared to the alternative state-of-art processes (i.e. pyro- or hydro-metallurgical) that are currently implemented to separate and recover the batteries metals, particularly, Ni, Co and Mn, will be proposed. The goal is to recover graphite and directly synthesize a high quality NMC cathodic material (Li(NixMnyCoz)O2) for new batteries, without the need to separate the individual metals, which is a costly operation.
The recovered NMC oxide and graphite will be used as cathode and anode active materials, respectively, for new Li-ion batteries. A full physical chemical characterization on these materials will be carried out prior to the battery assembly, to assess their suitability as cell components and tune the recycling process. Indeed, there¿s a critical concern in controlling the purity, particle size, thermal stability and morphology of final products to improve the battery performance. Electrochemical tests on the battery prototypes, assembled by selected recovered materials, will be performed by charge-discharge cycles under current-density regimes of interest for automotive applications. Possible undesired reactivity of the NMC cathode at highly oxidized state will be controlled by tuning the electrolyte composition through the addition of ionic liquid compounds stabilizing the electrode/electrolyte interface.
