Advanced Battery Recycling

Advanced battery recycling has potential to significantly reduce end-of-life cost for large format batteries. Available technology melts or dissolves batteries to recover cobalt or nickel, destroying advanced materials with potential for manufacturing use. With little elemental value in electric-drive applications, recyclers require substantial fees for decommission, and do not contribute to lowering the life- cycle cost of advanced battery materials. New recycling technology must reduce these costs for advanced batteries to help the industry gain long-term market share. The Phase I & amp; II project demonstrates feasibility of advanced recycling techniques and develops pilot scale processes using commercial grade lithium-ion batteries. The Phase I project demonstrated successful cradle-to- cradle use of advanced battery material. The feasibility study started with vehicle- grade, large-format lithium-ion cells, faded them to a well-used state, recovered and rejuvenated the material, and built numerous cells to demonstrate utility and feasibility of manufacturing with rejuvenated material. This SBIR Phase II project, Advanced Battery Recycling develops the pilot scale processes for harvest and rejuvenation of materials from end-of-life, mainstream, large-format lithium-ion batteries. Solid state, soft- chemical methods can revitalize materials to maximize their value independently of the elemental value. As a new, soft-chemically based recycling procedure, Advanced Recycling offers an important innovation to reduce human impact, increase efficiency, and produce low cost battery grade secondary material. The objective of this project is to recycle a high-power lithium-ion battery cathode material and demonstrate (1) scalability of processes and (2) multiple life-time use of rejuvenated material. Starting with spent batteries, the project recovers and refurbishes material, manufactures new batteries, tests and fades those cells and repeats the cradle-to-cradle process. The anticipated result of this development is establishment of pilot scale processes to rejuvenate high performance battery materials. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: This Phase I & amp; II SBIR project develops the most efficient and environmentally friendly recycling technology as the solution to the next generations significant environmental challenge: advanced materials recycling and manufacturing. The fully developed recycling process will be the basis for jobs fundamental to portable electronics and large format battery markets. The outcome is expected to be a safe and efficient commercial process providing manufacturers of large format batteries with cradle-to-cradle life-cycle services.