Universal and high efficient extraction of lithium for LIB recycling using mechanochemistry.

Abstract The increasing lithium-ion battery production calls for profitable and ecologically benign technologies for recycling and recovering critical components, such as Li. Unfortunately, all currently used industrial ways of recycling are always associated with large energy consumption and utilization of corrosive reagents, which creates a risk to the environment. Herein we report a high efficient mechanochemically induced acid-free process for recycling Li from cathode materials of different and mainly used chemistries such as LiCoO2, LiMn2O4, Li(CoNiMn)O2, and LiFePO4. The introduced technology uses Al as a reducing agent in the mechanochemical reaction. Two different processes have been developed to regenerate lithium from cathode materials and to transform it to the pure Li2CO3. The mechanisms of mechanochemical transformation, aqueous leaching, and the lithium purification process were investigated. The presented technology achieves a recovery rate for Li of up to 70% without applying any corrosive leachates or utilizing high temperatures. The key innovation is that the regeneration of lithium was successfully performed for all relevant cathode chemistries, including their mixture. As a result, the engineered process can be declared universal and therefore be applied for lithium recovery from spent LIBs without the sorting step, thus improving the economic benefit of recycling.