Recovering and Regenerating of Spent Anode Material From the Scrap of Used Lithium Ion Batteries

Abstract Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have been used intensively as energy storage for products powered by electricity, such as phones, laptops, electric vehicles, etc. Nevertheless, the increasing usage of LIBs is estimated to grow in the upcoming years due to the involvement of the technology of the electric vehicle. Therefore, the spent LIBs will increase in parallel to the demand growth which considers an obstacle to the environment as well as the economy in case left without recycling. So far, there are some recycling procedures that are focusing on the valuable metals existed in the spent cathode active materials, such as Ni, Co, and Li. However, the anode active material (graphite) in most cases consider as a waste. In this paper, the focus will be in an environmentally friendly and practical method for regenerating the spent anode active material. The aim of this study is to recover the anode material from the scrap of LIBs that contains the most popular types of LIBs such as LCO, LFP, LMO, NMC, and NCA. Then, the recovered anode active material will be heat treated to enhance its properties before being regenerated in a new LIB and farther evaluated. For the validation, an experiment was designed where a scrap of used LIBs has physically separated and the recovered anode active material has directly regenerated in new cells and evaluated by galvanostatic cycling. Finally, the results of the SEM/EDX show that the anode and cathode mixture materials have separated from each other completely within a short time (typically 0.2 sec). Also, the performance of the regenerated anode is very close to the performance of the commercial anode material indicating the validity of the regeneration process.