Recycling Spent Lithium Ion Batteries

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, lithium ion batteries (LIBs) have been widely used in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and clean energy electrochemical energy storage due to their excellent electrochemical properties. The rapid growth of lithium battery demand greatly increases the scale of their production, which means a large number of lithium batteries being wasted. From the perspective of resource utilization and environmental protection, the recycling of various materials in waste lithium batteries has significance for both its economic value and environmental protection, which also means that the recycling methods adopted or developed should be green, ensure environmental protection, and save costs. In addition, it is necessary to consider the centralized scrapping of a large number of batteries, so we also need to consider the development of efficient recycling treatments to cope with the possible mass scrapping of used lithium batteries.

In this Special Issue, we are looking for contributions helping to:

• Strengthen the estimation and management of the remaining power;
• Enhance the pretreatment process for recycling;
• Develop the process management and application of battery gradient utilization;
• Improve the terminal recycling process of used lithium ion batteries;
• Upgrade the material recycling process of retired lithium cells (e.g., pyrometallurgical process, hydrometallurgical process, mechanochemical metallurgical process);
• Enhance the direct recycling of spent lithium battery components (e.g., cathode materials, anode materials, electrolytes);
• Promote industrial recycling and reduce discarded lithium batteries;
• Prepare high-value-added products based on waste lithium battery materials;
• Determine the economic and carbon reduction benefits of lithium cell recycling.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Environmental influence of spent lithium cells;
• Innovative technology for the pretreatment process;
• State of charge (SOC) management;
• Chemical analysis of recycled products;
• Efficient and innovated recovery process;
• AI techniques for the recycling process;
• High-value-added application of recycled outputs;
• Life cycle assessment (LCA);
• The effects of the possible residual non-metal/metal impurities on the effectiveness of direct regeneration;
• Atomically disassembling sorting techniques;
• Upcycling of plastic polymer wastes in spent lithium batteries to value-added products;
• SoH prediction and detection, simplified screening, and regrouping spent LIBs via machine learning;
• Cascade utilization technology of residual power of spent LIB;
• Separation method of waste lithium battery electrolyte from anode and cathode materials;
• Separation and recovery of fluorinated inorganic substances in electrolytes;
• Electrolyte leakage during discharge of lithium battery.

Dr. Jia Li
Guest Editor

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• spent lithium batteries
• state of charge
• pretreatment process
• metallurgical process
• electrolyte treatment
• material reuse
• dissembling process
• ai technique
• high-value-added output
• life cycle assessment