Researchers from Rice College have give you a brand new method to raised battery recycling — recovering extra beneficial metals in, fairly actually, a flash.
“We developed a high-yield, low-cost methodology of reclaiming metals instantly from ‘black mass’ — the mixed cathode and anode waste the business historically tries to recycle — that considerably reduces the environmental footprint of spent battery processing,” co-lead creator Jinhang Chen explains.
“It takes lower than 20 minutes to dissolve the identical quantities versus 24 hours [with traditional recycling. Our findings have the potential to reduce the cost of battery waste recycling through decreased energy, water and acid consumption and lower carbon dioxide emissions.”
A “flash heating” system has been shown to dramatically improve the recyclability of “black mass” battery materials. (📷: Rice University)
The trick to the team’s technique: rapid temperature increases, using something the researchers call pulsed-DC flash Joule heating to raise the temperature of the “black mass” to above 2,100 Kelvin (around 3,320°F) in mere seconds — resulting, they found, in a three-orders-of-magnitude increase in what they call “leaching kinetics,” reducing processing time, allowing for the use of significantly more dilute acids, and improve yields of usable metals to above 98 percent.
“Currently, 95 percent of batteries are not recycled because we don’t have the capacity to recycle them, even as waste from electronics is increasing at an annual rate of nine percent,” claims James Tour, professor of chemistry and senior author on the paper. “A lot of current battery recycling processes involve the use of very strong acids, and these tend to be messy, cumbersome processes.
The flash-activated “black mass” reacts more readily with the recycling acids, improving efficiency. (📷: Chen et al)
“What we found is that if you ‘flash’ the black mass, then you can easily separate out the critical metals using only low-concentration hydrochloric acid,” Tour continues. “You could say the flash liberates the metals, so they dissolve easier. We’re still using acid, but much less. That’s why the economics is so much better.”
The team’s work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Science Advances.