Water-Based Electrode Manufacturing and Direct Recycling of Lithium-Ion Battery Electrodes—A Green and Sustainable Manufacturing System

• Main Authors: Jianlin Li, Yingqi Lu, Tairan Yang, Dayang Ge, David L. Wood, III, Zheng Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2020-05-01
• Series: iScience
• Subjects: Electrochemical Energy Storage; Energy Sustainability; Manufacturing
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004220302662

Summary: It is critical to develop a low-cost and environmentally friendly system to manufacture and recycle lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) as the demand on LIBs keeps increasing dramatically. Conventional LIB cathodes are manufactured using N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone as the solvent, which is expensive, highly toxic, flammable, and energy intensive to produce and recover. Ideally, a close-loop industrial supply chain should be built, in which the batteries are manufactured, market harvested, and recycled with minimal external toxic solvent through the whole system. This work demonstrates a green and more sustainable manufacturing method for LIBs where no hazardous organic solvent is used during electrode manufacturing and recycling. The electrodes fabricated via water-based processing demonstrate comparable rate performance and cycle life to the ones from conventional solvent-based processing. Utilization of a water-soluble binder enables recovering the cathode compound from spent electrodes using water, which is successfully regenerated to deliver comparable electrochemical performance to the pristine one.