Efficient separation and recovery of lithium through volatilization in the

recycling process of spent lithium-ion batteries

Valentina Bermúdez Gómez – 1001013365

Thanks to the creations of new technologies, among these the creation of

vehicles has increased, so the production of LIB has also grown at an
accelerated rate, but according to the scientist Kang, these only last
approximately 4 years and in addition previous studies have estimated that by
2035 there will be 1.38 to 6.76 million tons which contain lithium, cobalt and
copper, so this study is done from the point of view of sustainable
development for the environment, they propose a method of separation and
recovery by means of volitization, which requires high energy consumption in
the pyrometallurgical part but makes a small balance because the processing
time is very short.
What they did was use a copper slag as flux, what this slag contained is: CaO
and SiO2 which is a very good slag and used for the smelting processes and
on the other hand with the graphite and aluminum foil that they used, they It
gave a good reduction capacity. This process generates the smelting of spent
LIBs to clean the slag and thus reuse these LIBs, reducing production costs
and saving energy.
But there was a problem and that is that the recovery of lithium in
pyrometallurgical processes is a bit restricted and more so for the recycling of
LIBs, so the scientist Dang chose to add additives to volatilize and thus
managed to roast the material at a temperature of 1000 °C for 90 minutes and
obtained a recovery of 93.62% lithium.
They used a formula to calculate the volitization of lithium where they relate
the weights of the slag and the lithium content in each of them, this content
was determined by means of spectrometry and the calculations they made for
thermodynamics were obtained with the FactSage software. .
As a conclusion, the Li2CO3 could be obtained from lithium-containing powder
through a precipitation process. This method achieves an efficient separation
of lithium during the reduction casting process. The phase transformation and
the kinetics of the separation process were investigated, and the mechanism
of reaction.