INDUSTRY TRACK: Repairing and Upcycling of Electrode Materials from Spent Lithium Ion Batteries

INDUSTRY TRACK: With the popularity of new energy vehicles and various electronic devices, the use of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has shown explosive growth, which has resulted in a large number of spent LIBs. Spent LIBs contain a large amount of metal resources, and improper disposal will not only cause waste of resources, but also have potential environmental risks. The existing commercial recycling methods are mainly pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy recycling methods, both of which require re-extraction from the electrode material after destroying them to the atomic level for the preparation of new electrode materials, which is a long process with high cost, and involves the application of extreme conditions such as high temperature and strong acid, with inferior economic and environmental benefits. It is a major challenge in the field of battery recycling to develop innovative and clean recycling methods, to simplify the recycling process and to develop ways to reuse the recovered products. In view of the challenge of existing recycling methods, the reporters proposed the idea of direct recycling of electrode materials at the molecular scale, and designed innovative recycling methods such as direct repair of degraded lithium cobalt oxides with deep eutectic solvent (DES), repair of Ni-Mn-Co ternary (NCM) cathode with high failure degree by low temperature molten salt, and thermal regeneration of degraded lithium iron phosphate (LFP) with multifunctional solvent; and closed-loop design of the direct recycling process. In addition, we propose a high-value utilization path for the conversion of degraded electrode materials to high-performance electrode materials and nano-catalysts. It greatly simplifies the recycling process, avoids the use of extreme conditions, and provides a new technical system and theoretical guidance for battery recycling research and industry.