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The global transition to electric vehicles and renewable energy systems continues to gain support from governments and investors. As a result, the demand for electric energy storage systems such as lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has substantially increased. This is a significant motivator for reassessing end-of-life strategies for these batteries. Most importantly, a strong focus on transitioning from landfilling to an efficient recycling system is necessary to ensure the reduction of total global emissions, especially those from LIBs. Furthermore, LIBs contain many resources which can be reused after recycling; however, the compositional and component complexity of LIBs poses many challenges. This study focuses on the recycling and reusing of copper (Cu) and aluminum (Al) foils, which are the anode and cathode current-collectors (CCs) of LIBs. For this purpose, methods for the purification of recycled Cu and Al CCs for reusing in LIBs are explored in this paper. To show the effectiveness of the purification, the recycled CCs are used to make new LIBs, followed by an investigation of the performance of the made LIBs. Overall, it seems that the LIBs’ CCs can be reused to make new LIBs. However, an improvement in the purification method is still recommended for future work to increase the new LIB cycling.

Due to their safety and high power density, one of the most promising types of all-solid-state lithium batteries is the one made with the argyrodite solid electrolyte (ASE). Although substantial efforts have been made toward the commercialization of this battery, it is still challenged by some technical issues. One of these issues is to prevent the side reactions at the interface of the ASE and the cathode active material (CAM). A solution to address this issue is to coat the CAM particles with a material that is compatible with both ASE and CAM. Prior studies show that the lithium niobate, LiNbO3, (LNO) is a promising material for coating CAM particles to reduce the interfacial side reactions. However, no systematic study is available in the literature to show the effect of coating LNO on CAM performance. This paper aims to quantify the effect of LNO coating on the electrochemical performance of a nickel-rich CAM. The electrochemical performance parameters that are studied are the capacity, cycling performance, and rate performance of the coated-CAM; and the effectiveness of the coating to prevent the side reactions at the ASE and CAM interface is out of the scope of this study. To eliminate the effect of side reactions at the ASE and CAM interface, we conduct all tests in the organic liquid electrolyte (OLE) cells to solely present the effect of coating on the CAM performance. For this purpose, 0.5 wt.% and 1 wt.% LNO are used to coat the LiNi0.6Mn0.2Co0.2O2 (NMC-60) CAM through two synthesizing methods. Consequently, the effects of the synthesizing method and the coating weight percentage on the NMC-60 performance are presented.

Manual disassembly of the lithium-ion battery (LIB) modules of electric vehicles (EVs) for recycling is time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous for technicians or workers. Dangers associated with high voltage and thermal runaway make a robotic system suitable for the automated or semi-automated disassembly of EV batteries. In this paper, we explore battery disassembly using industrial robots. To understand the disassembly process, human workers were monitored, and the operations were analyzed and broken down into gripping and cutting operations. These operations were selected for automation, and path planning was performed offline. For the gripper, a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control system was implemented. A system identification method was also implemented in the form of a batch least squares estimator to form the state space representation of the planar linkages used in the control strategy of the gripper. A high-speed rotary cut-off wheel was adapted for the robot to perform precise cutting at various points in the battery module case. The simulation results were used to program an industrial robot for experimental validation. The precision of the rotary cutter allowed for a more direct disassembly method as opposed to the standard manual method. It was shown that the robot was almost twice as fast in cutting but slower in pick and place operations. It has been shown that the best option for disassembly of a LIB pack is a human–robot collaboration, where the robot could make efficient cuts on the battery pack and the technician could quickly sort the battery components and remove connectors or fasteners with which the robot would struggle. This collaboration also reduces the danger encountered by the technician because the risk of shorting battery cells while cutting would be eliminated, but the time efficiency would be significantly improved. This paper demonstrates that a robot offers both safety and time improvements to the current manual disassembly process for EV LIBs.

The cathode performance of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) fabricated from recycled cathode active materials is studied for three scenarios. These scenarios are based on the conditions for separation of different cathode active materials in recycling facilities during the LIB’s recycling process. In scenario one, the separation process is performed ideally, and the obtained pure single cathode active material is used to make new LIBs after regeneration. In scenario two, the separation of active materials is performed with efficiencies of less than 100%, which is the actual case in the recycling process. In this scenario, a single cathode active material that contains a little of the other types of cathode active materials is used to make new LIBs after the materials’ regeneration. In scenario three, the separation has not been performed during the recycling process. In this scenario, all types of cathode active materials are regenerated together, and a mixture is used to make new LIBs. The studies are performed through modeling and computer simulation, and several experiments are conducted for validation purposes. The cathode active materials that are studied are the five commercially available cathodes made of LiMn2O4 (LMO), LiCoO2 (LCO), LiNixMnyCo(1−x−y)O2 (NMC), LiNixCoyAl(1−x−y)O2 (NCA), and LiFePO4 (LFP). The results indicate that the fabrication of new LIBs with a mixture of cathode active materials is possible when cathode active materials are not ideally separated from each other. However, it is recommended that the separation process is added to the recycling process, at least for the separation of LFP or reducing its amount in the cathode active materials mixture. This is because of the difference of the voltage level of LFP compared to the other studied active materials for cathodes.