NSF Award
2337184
NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY:<br/><br/>Battery technology is essential to our modern way of life: it powers everything from cellphones to pacemakers to, more recently, vehicles. The rapidly growing demand for batteries has led to a dramatic increase in battery waste. Furthermore, increasing demand has necessitated an increase in mining minerals important for batteries, often from politically unstable locations. Battery recycling holds promise to address both problems: recycled battery waste reduces the extent of battery waste and recovers the raw materials needed to make new batteries. However, current battery recycling methods use harsh chemicals and designer processes to recover the most valuable components of battery waste, limiting both scalability and environmental sustainability. With this Clean Energy Technology (CET) EAGER award, supported by the Solid State and Materials Chemistry program in NSF’s Division of Materials Research, investigators at SUNY at Albany and Youngstown State University study a new method for battery recycling that is more sustainable and more efficient. The method takes advantage of liquids that interact strongly with the materials to pull them out of battery waste, regardless of the original battery design. Those materials can then be purified using a combination of adsorption – a process by which the targeted elements selectively stick to a high-surface area powder – and electrodeposition, a process by which the remaining elements are individually removed from the initial liquid using an electric current. One challenge of the project is that the liquids need to strongly interact with the battery waste materials, but not break down the material that purifies the waste stream. The outcome of this project will significantly impact the battery industry, the environment, and the national security of the United States. It offers a way to reduce our dependence on unreliable sources for battery materials, protect the environment from excessive battery waste, and help to ensure the continued growth of the domestic battery industry and, additionally, provides state-of-the-art research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students.<br/><br/>TECHNICAL SUMMARY:<br/><br/>The rapid rise of battery technology has led to a critical need for new approaches to battery recycling in order to both recover precious battery metals and reduce battery waste. The long-term goal of this Clean Energy Technology (CET) EAGER award, supported by the Solid State and Materials Chemistry program in NSF’s Division of Materials Research, is to develop a system capable of isolating all individual metallic components of spent lithium ion batteries (LIBs) from a common waste stream. Researchers at SUNY at Albany and Youngstown State University take advantage of solvents capable of oxidizing and coordinating to these metal components to remove them from mechanically processed battery waste (black mass). After dissolution, the metal components are separated by a combination of adsorption and electrodeposition. For adsorption, new metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are design specifically to isolate alkali metals (e.g., Li) through reversible and selective interactions. Individual transition metals are collected by electrodeposition, which allows isolation of each transition metal based on the redox characteristics of the parent transition metal complex in solution. This investigation is expected to lead to significant scientific insights and advances: first, mechanisms for metal dissolution in coordinating solvents are elucidated, enabling the discovery of solvents more environmentally benign than those currently used for this purpose. Second, knowledge about reversible adsorption processes for cation adsorption in MOFs is advanced. Third, selective transition metal electrodeposition, in combination with the other results from this work, enable the collection of the most valuable components of batteries of any composition. The study is expected to have broader impacts in the areas of mineral mining and extraction, recycling of rare-earth-containing materials, and energy efficient metal ion separation and purification.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
