High Performance Cathode Recovery from Different Electric Vehicle Recycling Streams

For environmental and sustainability reasons, spent Li-ion batteries must be recovered and recycled so that the full promise of an electrified future is realized. Li-ion battery recycling streams pose a serious challenge to all existing recycling technologies because of their unknown and diverse chemistry. In the work described in this paper, four representative recycling streams were used to demonstrate the flexibility of the recycling process developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) to accommodate a variable feed and to generate consistent quality cathode material, LiNi1/3Mn1/3Co1/3O2 (NMC111). Ni1/3Mn1/3CO1/3(OH)2 precursors derived from four recycling streams were produced by a hydroxide coprecipitation method in a continuous stirred tank reactor. It took 2 days for the coprecipitation reaction to reach steady state. A possible evolution of the precursor particles up to the steady state was proposed. Both the precursors and the cathodes from these four different recycling streams exhibit sim...