Lithium Ion Battery Recycling – Recovery of Cobalt Sulfate and Sulfuric Acid with Seeded Membrane Distillation Crystallization

Description

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) hold immense potential as a secondary source of valuable materials like cobalt, nickel, manganese, and lithium. Recovering these critical resources through efficient recycling processes is crucial. Solvent extraction offers a promising method for separating these components from end-of-life LIBs. Membrane distillation crystallization (MDC) arises as a sustainable and evolving technique for treating this reusable material while simultaneously recovering both salt and purified water. The recovered salts can be used for various industrial applications, reducing the need for salt mining, which can have environmental impacts. The composition of the artificial solutions is similar to the real stripping solution from the LIB recycling process. To assess the impact of seeding crystals, MDC experiments were conducted in a lab setup using a tubular polypropylene (PP) membrane. Seeding crystals of silicon dioxide were introduced, allowing them to grow on existing particles and subsequently be separated within the classifier section. For comparison, separate membrane distillation (MD) experiments were carried out in the same setup, but without the use of seeding crystals. It could be observed that the salt rejection rate in the MDC experiment is constant at 99.9% over the operation time. The salt rejection rate in the MD experiment declines after 3.5 h from 99.9% to 97.8%. Furthermore, both experiments achieved similar concentration factors 2.5 for MDC and 2.6 for MD. In addition to the experiment with cobalt sulfate, an experiment was also conducted with sulfuric acid. The permeate flux of sulfuric acid was between 4 – 3.7 kg m-2 h-1 during 2 h. The sulfuric acid solution was concentrated to a ratio of 122.

Period	09 Sept 2024
Event title	EuroMembrane 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Czech RepublicShow on map