Is the power battery recycling technology and experience mature?

　　In recent years, the field of new energy vehicles has developed rapidly, and my country has become the largest market for new energy vehicles in the world. However, after a large number of new energy vehicles are put on the market, where will the subsequent waste batteries flow, how will they be recycled, and how will they be reused?

　　In recent years, the field of new energy vehicles has developed rapidly, and my country has become the largest market for new energy vehicles in the world. However, after a large number of new energy vehicles are put on the market, where the subsequent waste batteries will flow, how to recycle them, and how to reuse them have become issues that the industry has to pay attention to. Questions whether the utilization is environmentally friendly.

　　Wu Feng, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, once publicly stated: “A 20-gram cell phone battery can pollute the water of three standard swimming pools. Tons of electric vehicle power batteries are discarded in the natural environment? A large amount of heavy metals and chemical substances entering the nature will cause greater pollution to the environment."

　　A large number of potential pollution hazards have forced the power battery industry to speed up the pace of improving the power battery recycling and processing mechanism, and it has also begun to let the industry start to think about this problem collectively.

　　Where should I go after it is scrapped?

　　It is understood that the general service life of power lithium-ion batteries is about 20 years, but when the capacity of power lithium-ion batteries for vehicles decreases below 80%, they will be discarded, and the use time is about 3-8 years.

　　At present, combining the theory of circular economy and the principle of product life cycle analysis (LCA), a schematic diagram of the recycling of power lithium batteries in the figure has been established:

　　Since the power battery still retains about 80% of the capacity when it is discarded, if it is directly recycled as a resource, it will cause great waste. Therefore, the current recycling of power lithium batteries is mainly to realize the cascade recycling and utilization of power batteries by dismantling, testing and classifying the used power batteries of automobiles. Power lithium battery reuse terminals are mainly aimed at home energy storage, shops, new energy distributed power generation, disaster prevention bases, communication base stations, micro electric vehicles, electric bicycle applications and other fields. Applications in these fields have relatively low requirements for energy density. By processing the power batteries of new energy vehicles into these fields, waste of resources and costs can also be reduced.

　　What treatment methods can be used now?

　　Power lithium battery is mainly composed of shell, positive electrode, negative electrode, diaphragm, electrolyte, etc. The recycling process of power batteries is roughly two parts: the first step is to carry out the pretreatment process of discharging, dismantling, crushing, and sorting; the second step is to separate the disassembled plastic, and then perform alkaline leaching and acid leaching of the electrode material , Extraction after impurity removal; or direct high-temperature incineration to dismantle the fragments to recover metals and further use wet methods to recover incineration residues.

　　The processing methods of this process can be divided into two types: physical recovery and chemical recovery. In chemical recovery, there are mainly two methods: pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. For physical recovery, low temperature is used to reduce the chemical reaction activity of lithium compounds for processing. Which method is used depends on the type and quantity of batteries, different fields of subsequent investment, and different methods of selection.

　　But it should be noted that due to the complexity of the process and treatment methods, there is the possibility of secondary pollution in every step of the process of recycling and treatment.