Optimizing the Hydro-metallurgical Extraction of Supply-Chain Critical Metals from Emulated Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries

Lithium-ion batteries are an integral part of today’s society, powering ubiquitous rechargeable devices. However, only 5% of all lithium-ion batteries are recycled, resulting in 8 million tons of waste being dumped in landfills [1]. This poses a risk to the environment and requires new metal to be mined. Improving the recycling process for lithium-ion batteries can have a large impact even in small communities like Plano, where over a ton of valuable metal can be extracted from lithium-ion batteries every year. There are several methods that can be used to recycle lithium-ion batteries, but they are largely inefficient and expensive. This paper aims to outline the optimization of the efficiency of hydro-metallurgical processes to extract metal from spent lithium-ion batteries. The proposed process has three steps - filtration, chelation, and electrolysis. Filtration removes the insoluble debris from the solution, chelation will be used to remove select metals like iron from the solution, and electrolysis can be used to extract the rest of the valuable metals. The data collected from the experiment indicated that the methods used were successful in improving the efficiency of the whole extraction. However, work still needs to be done to improve the efficiency on a commercially viable scale.