14250 battery

The United States develops an environmentally friendly method for 14250 battery manufacturing and recycling, which can reduce processing costs and energy consumption.

According to foreign media reports, researchers at Virginia Tech in the United States have demonstrated a green and sustainable 14250 battery (LIB) manufacturing method that can avoid the use of harmful organic solvents in the production and recycling of battery electrodes.

(: Virginia Tech)

The researchers found that the rate performance and cycle life of electrodes made by water-based processes are comparable to those of electrodes made by traditional solvent-based processes. The use of water-soluble binders can use water to recover cathode compounds from waste electrodes. After successfully regenerating such compounds, the electrochemical performance of the new electrode is comparable to that of the original electrode.

During battery manufacturing and processing, mass production of lithium batteries may cause environmental problems. Traditional 14250 battery electrodes, especially cathodes, are made using N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) as a solvent and a slurry method. In fact, it is estimated that a battery manufacturing plant with an annual output of 100,000 sets of 60kW, 10kWh plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) batteries uses 4.1 million kilograms of NMP to deposit the cathode layer each year. Considering that the global production of lithium batteries is about 400GWh, a large amount of NMP is required.

However, NMP is an expensive regenerated toxic substance and was listed as an idle material by the European Commission in 2018. In addition, in the production process of lithium batteries, about 47% of the energy consumption is spent on the electrode drying process for the evaporation and recovery of NMP solvent. If water is used to replace NMP, the energy consumption can be reduced by a quarter. On the drying chamber equipment, 29% of the energy is consumed to control the humidity and temperature of the slurry mixing and casting operations. Therefore, it is necessary to develop new electrode production processes and/or NMP substitutes to reduce processing costs and energy consumption.

The researchers replaced NMP with water in electrode production, separated the black material (a mixture of carbon black and active materials) from the collector, dissolved the water-soluble binder in water for recycling, separated the active material from the carbon black, and re-lithiated it to generate battery materials.

The researchers said that the water-based processed electrodes used in this study have excellent electrochemical properties, which are comparable to those of electrodes made from recycled materials. If some potential challenges can be addressed, this approach could provide a green, sustainable process for manufacturing and recycling lithium batteries.

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