Physical Process for Li-Ion Battery Recycling from Electric Vehicles

The increasing demand for Li-ion batteries driven by the demand of electric vehicles has led to a shortage of critical raw materials. Recycling has therefore become an alternative for natural resource conservation and supply of critical materials throughout the circular economy. The aim of this work was to propose an integrated physical processing route for recycling different Li-ion battery cells (pouch, cylindrical, and prismatic) and cathodes (NMC and NMC-LMO) for hydrometallurgical treatment in a single route. Different physical separation techniques, including attrition cell, dense medium separation, sieving, magnetic, and electrostatic separation, were evaluated to identify the advantages of each method in material separation. Resulting products can be highlighted as the Cu-rich fraction, Al + cathode material, plastic fraction, graphite + cathode fraction, external structure/case of battery cells, and Li solution. There is no use of heat treatment in the process. Different purities were obtained according to the battery type: 65–80% of Cu stream and over 96% of cathode material in Al + cathode streams. The process separated all plastic and external structures into different streams without contaminations. The Al and graphite + cathode streams can be further processed with a hydrometallurgical process to obtain high-purity salts.