The United States Advanced Battery Consortium – a collaborative organisation of Ford Motor Company, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles – has been awarded a US$ 2.2 million contract to researchers to establish a new lithium-ion battery recycling process. The initiative also aims to produce new plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) battery cells using the recovered cathode materials.
The 2-year project will be conducted at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the United States. Laboratory studies so far have allowed the researchers to recycle up to 80% of the cathode materials from unsorted batteries using this process, says WPI’s Yan Wang, who leads the innovative endeavour. The process he developed requires virtually no sorting.
In the process, the batteries are shredded and the steel, aluminium, iron, copper, and plastics are recovered and recycled. The cathode materials are recovered and then used to synthesize new cathodes.
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Car battery recycling
VATIS UPDATE Part
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