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With the surge in global sales of electric vehicles, the demand for lithium batteries is rising. According to foreign media reports, researchers at the University of Toronto have developed new technologies that can help recover metals from lithium batteries.

Gisele Azimi, professor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry of the School of Applied Science and Engineering of the University, and his team proposed a new and more sustainable method to recover valuable metals in lithium batteries that have reached their service life, including lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese.

: University of Toronto

Jiakai Zhang, a doctoral student in chemical engineering and applied chemistry, said: It takes a lot of energy to obtain these metals from raw ores. However, if the existing batteries are recycled, we can increase support for the limited supply chain and reduce the cost of electric vehicle batteries.

Battery recycling can not only supply the required materials at a lower cost, but also reduce the demand for raw ore mining, thus protecting the environment.

The expected life of electric vehicle battery is 10-20 years, but most automobile manufacturers only provide warranty of 8 years or 160000 kilometers (whichever comes first). When the service life is reached, the electric vehicle battery can also be refurbished for secondary use or recycled metal. But today many batteries will be improperly discarded and eventually buried.

The conventional process for recovering lithium batteries is based on pyrometallurgy using extremely high temperatures or hydrometallurgy using acids and reducing agents for extraction. Both processes are energy-intensive: pyrometallurgy will produce greenhouse gas emissions, while hydrometallurgy will produce wastewater for treatment.

In contrast, Azimi's laboratory team is using supercritical fluid extraction to recover metals from discarded lithium batteries. By using the extraction solvent at a temperature and pressure higher than the critical point, the process can separate one component from the other, and has the characteristics of both liquid and gas at this temperature and pressure.

In order to recover metals, Zhang used carbon dioxide as solvent to raise the temperature to 31º C, and increase the pressure to 7Mpa to reach the supercritical phase.

The team showed that compared with the traditional leaching process, this process made the extraction efficiency of lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese reach 90%. At the same time, it used fewer chemicals and significantly reduced secondary waste. In fact, the important energy source consumed in the process of supercritical fluid extraction is the compression of carbon dioxide.

Azimi said: The advantage of our method is that we use carbon dioxide in the air as a solvent, rather than highly dangerous acids or bases, and carbon dioxide is rich, cheap and inert, and easy to handle, discharge and recover.

Supercritical fluid extraction is not a new process. Since the 1870s, this process has been used in the food and pharmaceutical industry to extract coffee beans. However, this is the first time that this process is used to recover metal from lithium batteries. In the future, Azimi and its research team will continue to improve the process and promote the commercialization of the method.

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