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Power Earth Science Technology

Nanoengineer Finds New Way To Recycle Lithium-Ion Batteries (latimes.com) 72

Posted by BeauHD from the fixing-the-world's-problems dept.
Zheng Chen, a 31-year-old nanoengineer at UC San Diego, says he has developed a way to recycle used cathodes from spent lithium-ion batteries and restore them to a like-new condition. The cathodes in some lithium-ion batteries are made of metal oxides that contain cobalt, a metal found in finite supplies and concentrated in one of the world's more precarious countries. Los Angeles Times reports how it works: The process takes degraded particles from the cathodes found in a used lithium-ion battery. The particles are then pressurized in a hot alkaline solution that contains lithium salt. Later, the particles go through a short heat-treating process called annealing, in which temperatures reach more than 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. After cooling, Chen's team takes the regenerated particles and makes new cathodes. They then test the cathodes in batteries made in the lab. The new cathodes have been able to maintain the same charging time, storage capacity and battery lifetime as the originals did. Details of the recycling method were recently published in the research journal Green Chemistry, submitted by Chen and two colleagues.
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Nanoengineer Finds New Way To Recycle Lithium-Ion Batteries More

Nanoengineer Finds New Way To Recycle Lithium-Ion Batteries

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  • more good news for EV's! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by polar red ( 215081 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @06:34AM (#56984542)

    This should make EV's more price-competitive! take out your tesla battery after 300,000 km for a refresh and your car is as good as new!

    • Re:more good news for EV's! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Saturday July 21, 2018 @07:03AM (#56984590)

      The key question is if this process can be done cheaply enough that it's cheaper to recycle lithium-ion batteries than to just make new ones. Of course the process could be government-subsidized/mandated for environmental reasons. Ideally, a way to achieve this process inside the battery itself would be possible (without causing it to explode).

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        "Of course the process could be government-subsidized/mandated for environmental reasons"

        Well, not in the United States, anyhow. We took the EPA out back and let the Republicans in Congress use it for target practice.

      • The key question is if this process can be done cheaply enough that it's cheaper to recycle lithium-ion batteries than to just make new ones.

        That is a short-term concern.

        Of course the process could be government-subsidized/mandated for environmental reasons.

        Welcome to long-term planning. :)

        Ideally, a way to achieve this process inside the battery itself would be possible (without causing it to explode).

        That's some next level shit and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.

      • Re:more good news for EV's! (Score:5, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday July 21, 2018 @09:43AM (#56984902) Homepage Journal

        The batteries are already recycled. What isn't recycled is the electrolyte. I was all excited when I read the headline until I found out that it was bullshit. He found out how to recycle part of Li-Ion batteries. But the biggest part currently not being recycled is the electrolyte...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The best thing for EV batteries when they are no longer good for EV use is second life battery projects [youtube.com] reusing them for less demanding applications like static energy storage. When they can no longer deliver bursts of high current they can still hold lots of charge and be useful for years, for example balancing supply and demand in a house running on solar electricity. Maybe after they're no good for that either they'll be worth dismantling and recycling.

  • [...] cobalt, a metal found in finite supplies [...]

    As long as we are stuck on this planet, everything is in finite supplies.

  • If they got a miniengineer they could do this on a much larger scale.

  • What is a Fahrenheit?

    • It's a unit of temperature based on putting the common range of temperatures people encounter in everyday life on a 0-100 scale, with sufficient granularity that the temperature adjustment knob in your car can go in increments of 1, instead of 0.5 like Celsius is forced to do.

      I'm all for metric, but I IMHO the SI folks seriously screwed up when they set 100 C as the boiling point of water. They turned it into a temperature scale more suitable for cooking and high-temperature physics, than for regular pe

  • The real news in this story is that they've apparently shrunk an engineer down to the scale of a few dozen angstrom units. How did they do that? There must be a huge number of applications for such a compact engineer.

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