Battery Tech Bundle

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have been the preferred portable energy source in recent decades. The tremendous growth in the use of LIBs has resulted in a great number of spent LIBs. Disposal of these spent LIBs will cause serious environmental problems due to hazardous components such as heavy metals and electrolytes. Materials contained in the spent LIBs are valuable resources and could be recycled by proper technologies. Current methods are not suitable for LIB recycling due to slow process, low purity of the products (low profits) and the use of non-environmental friendly leaching reagents.The proposed LIB recycling technology is based on a co-precipitation process and control system which can process various types of spent LIBs including lithium cobalt oxide (LCO), lithium manganese oxide (LMO), lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) and lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide (NCA). The co-precipitation method allows the recovery of cathode metal salts in their original form, without separation of the metal elements. The obtained metal salts could then serve as the precursor for synthesis of new cathode material. In summary the process recovers the following products at more than 99% purity levels: (a) graphite and (b) cathode metal salts e.g. LiCo1/3Ni1/3Mn1/3O2, NiCO3, MnCO3, CoC2O4, and Li2CO3.The technology provider is seeking a partner who is willing to fund the prototype development and become an early adopter of the technology. Preferably, the partner should have access to spent LIB sources to support the trial.

The smart telemetry is a system for remote monitoring of the status and parameters of the battery system in electric vehicles. The system front-end comprises of Global Positioning System (GPS) and 3rd Generation/4th Generation cellular communication (3G/4G) enabled devices with built-in sensors, to provide battery stack monitoring and data-logging capabilities.  Data collected are relayed in real-time to data centre at the back-end.  The system is a plug and play setup and comes with remote system recovery function from the server.The technology is connected to the car's battery management system to collect the basic battery data through CAN bus for State-of-Charge (SoC) and State-of-Health (SoH) determination. The algorithm developed and built in on-board to determine the SoC and SoH of the battery pack, can support individual cell level. The technology will monitor and diagnose different parameters (i.e. Voltage, Temperature, SoC, SoH) of the individual battery cell in real time, and provide notifications of the failure/defective cell.

With the retirement of massive amount of end-of-life lithium ion batteries (LIBs), proper disposal of the hazardous wastes and cost-effective valorization of useful materials have become increasingly pressing and attracted extensive attention worldwide. The state-of-the-art recycling technologies, which are generally based on chemical leaching methods, have critical issues of enormous chemicals consumption, secondary pollution and tedious procedures.The technology relates to an innovative redox targeting-based process for the recycling of spent lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries. With 0.20M of ferrocyanide [Fe(CN)6]3- solution as a selective and regenerative redox mediator, LiFePO4 is readily broken down into FePO4 and Li+ via the redox-targeting reaction. An Li-removal efficiency of 99.8% has been achieved with 50 minutes reaction at ambient conditions. The reacted redox species [Fe(CN)6]4- are instantaneously regenerated on the electrode for subsequent round of reaction while Li+ ion is separated from the counter electrode compartment as lithium hydroxide (LiOH). The technology provider is currently seeking industry partner to scale-up and commercialise the technology.

With the wide deployment of renewable energy harvesting devices, such as solar cells and wind turbines, there is an urgency to develop efficient and economical energy storage systems to stabilize the intermittent and often unpredictable primary power sources before the power can be channeled to the grid safely or utilized for on-site loads. Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are regarded as promising electrochemical energy storage devices due to their special features of separable energy and power capacity. However, redox flow batteries tend to have lower energy densities than integrated cell architectures. Here our inventions introduce the novel engineering design to and reduce bulk resistance with no significant increase in flow resistance, obtaining uniform flow throughout the battery cell and improving the overall system efficiency.

As the consumption of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) for the transportation and consumer electronics sectors continues to grow, so does the pile of battery waste. Lithium-ion battery waste retains value particularly in the form of metal ions in the cathode part of the device, but few standardised methods exist to extract, recover, and reuse these precious metals. Such metals can be extracted using environmentally-friendly deep eutectic solvents which is safer than other corrosive hydrometallurgical methods which typically use strong acids, or high-energy pyrometallurgical methods which incinerate and grind waste battery material at temperatures beyond 1000˚C. The deep eutectic solvents (DES) can be made from commercially available commodities such as choline chloride and ethylene glycol which makes them good candidates for industrial scales. The battery recycling industries could benefit from the use of safer solvents that can still effectively extract and recover precious metals from spent lithium-ion batteries for reuse in other applications.Starting with disassembly of the LIB, cathode waste is inserted into a DES, which is then heated and stirred. Extraction of cobalt and lithiumm ions occurs through dissolution, and at this step, aluminium foil, binder and conductive carbon can be recovered separately when the leachate is filtered. Cobalt compounds can then be recovered either through precipitation or electrodeposition, allowing reutilization of these valuable materials.