Wednesday, 1 June 2022: 17:40
West Meeting Room 210 (Vancouver Convention Center)
The development of next-generation energy storage devices and systems for electric vehicles (EVs) relies on materials with significantly improved performance and lower cost. The increasing amount of lithium-ion battery (LIBs) consumption will result in the resource shortage and price increase of lithium and precious transition metals (Co, Ni etc.) that are critical for making high-performance LIBs. Also, future batteries that mainly use low-cost materials (Na, Fe, Mn) will have limited economic benefits to recycle even though the wastes generated from disposal of used batteries can cause severe environment pollution. In this context, design of low-cost and energy-efficient recycling and regeneration process for spent batteries is attracting growing interest. From a reversible chemistry point of view, this talk will focus on a potential strategy to directly recycle and regenerate spent LIBs using a “non-destructive” approach, which will lead to new electrode materials that can show the same level of performance as the native materials. We will show successful recycling of various battery materials, including cathode (LiMO2, LiMn2O4, and LiFePO4) and anode (graphite) using the direct regeneration approach. Such a strategy combines fundamental understanding and process optimization for remanufacturing of energy materials. Therefore, it can potentially offer a sustainable solution for future energy storage.