A research team in China has developed an innovative self-powered system comprising an electrochemical Li-ion battery (LIB) recycling reactor and a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) for recycling spent LFP batteries. A paper on their work appears in the RSC journal Energy & Environmental Science.

In the electrochemical LIB recycling reactor, the Cl−/ClO⁻ pair generated electrochemically in NaCl solution is adopted as the redox mediator to break down LFP into FePO₄ and Li⁺ via a redox targeting reaction without extra chemicals.

Additionally, a TENG that utilizes discarded components from LIBs including casings, aluminum-plastic films and current collectors is designed to drastically minimize secondary pollutants. The TENG harvests wind energy, delivering an output of 0.21 W for powering the electrochemical recycling system and charging batteries.

The proposed system for recycling spent LFP exhibits high purity (Li₂CO₃, 99.70% and FePO₄, 99.75%), self-powered features, simplified treatment procedure and a high profit, which can promote the sustainability of LIB technologies, the researchers said.

Zhang et al.

Lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFPs) represent more than 32% of the worldwide lithium-ion battery (LIB) market share. State-of-the-art recycling technologies, which are typically based on electrochemical or chemical leaching methods, have critical issues such as tedious procedures, enormous chemical/electricity consumption and secondary pollution.

Resources

• Baofeng Zhang, Lixia He, Jing Wang, Yuebo Liu, Xu Xue, Shengnan He, Chuguo Zhang, Zhihao Zhao, Linglin Zhou, Jie Wang and Zhong Lin Wang (2023) “Self-powered recycling of spent lithium iron phosphate batteries via triboelectric nanogenerator” Energy Environ. Sci. doi: 10.1039/D3EE01156A