lithium-ion Battery Recycling – Recovering the Valuable Metals

The demand for lithium-ion batteries being produced for use in consumer electronics and electric vehicles has exploded in recent years.?This trend is expected to continue as more and more states are pushing, and in some cases legislating the move to all-electric cars in the not-too-distant future.?Ultimately this will create a growing need for technologies to recover and recycle the materials used in these batteries.?Metals used in lithium-ion batteries are both valuable and toxic.?This raises the question of how the metals in these batteries can be safely recovered and reused.

Jiakai Zhang and Gisele Azimi in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, have been investigating the use of Supercritical CO2 along with several key modifiers to enhance the recovery of these metals.?Their study “develops a supercritical fluid extraction process using supercritical CO2 solvent with tributyl phosphate–nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide adduct to recover the four metals from the LIBs of electric vehicles.”

These university research scientists acquired commercially available SF equipment from Supercritical Fluid Technologies (SFT).?SFT performed a few minor modification to the standard 500ml base system to optimize it for the specialized needs of their application.?

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More about SFT’s supercritical extractors: https://www.supercriticalfluids.com/products/supercritical-fluid-extraction-products