NSF Award
2219826
The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a machine designed to address the lithium-ion batteries recycling needs in an economically feasible way so that it directly benefits the society in numerous ways. It reduces the environmental impacts and the associate health risk for human and wildlife that may be caused due to landfilling these batteries. If lithium-ion batteries are landfilled, society will encounter environmental issues such as land and water contaminations and fire and explosion of landfilled batteries. It also reduces the needs to extract rare elements such as lithium and cobalt from mines to save the mines for next generations. Lastly, it improves the United States’ national security because recycling can keep the major elements or materials of lithium-ion batteries in the closed-loop of manufacturing in the country and reduces the dependency of the United States to import these elements or materials from other countries. This project will generate new jobs for labors and engineers in the United States and opens job opportunities for persons with disabilities since the process/machine can be automated. This work will increase the economic competitiveness of the United States compared to China and Europe, which are currently the pioneer in recycling lithium-ion batteries.<br/><br/>This I-Corps project is based on the development of a recycling machine based on our two fundamental research activities, one for effective separation of electrode materials from current collectors, and one for efficient separation of anode and cathode active materials from each other. The key point is that the separations are performed without causing any damage to the morphology and composition of the anode and cathode active materials so that the separated materials can be directly regenerated and returned to the battery manufacturing process. This increases the profit from the obtained recycled materials from the proposed machine. These two key separation processes enable us to (1) offer a potentially small machine for recycling lithium-ion batteries, and (2) recycle all types of lithium-ion batteries with different chemistries and manufacturers with one machine. However, the machine operating parameters should be adjusted for each type of battery. Some of the value propositions of this machine are (1) it can be deployed fast in any location, (2) it reduces the cost of spent lithium-ion batteries transportation, handling and storage, (3) it improves the recycling efficiency, and (4) it produces more valuable outputs from spent lithium-ion batteries.<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.
